excerpt from “Death Rattles” by Liz Breazeale

At dinner that night, Lo chops off her boyfriend’s head.

He’s explaining again, holding forth about how she just has a better eye for cleaning than he does, it’s a compliment to her that she even notices when something’s out of place, he wishes he could be as detail oriented as her—and she slinks into the kitchen with his voice droning, tests the heft of the camping hatchet he left on the counter three days ago.

She weighs its factual, easy lethality, and in her grows a gut-deep scooping sensation, as she remembers an image of her mother, ax raised over a snake. Her boyfriend is saying, I guess I just don’t see it, and his voice thrums, a constant generator hum. He doesn’t notice when she creeps behind him, lifts the weapon. He doesn’t notice when she pauses, sighs. He hasn’t fixed his hair since he changed shirts after work, leaving it fluffed in places, cowlicks sparking a deep warmth, an invasion of tenderness.

I just wish it wasn’t always so cluttered around here, he continues. Nothing is ever where I left it.

Lo swings the hatchet just right.

Her boyfriend’s head tumbles to the floor.

Lo’s breath stops. Her pulse jolts. The head seems like a mask wearing a mask, a mask of his face over a different mask of his face. The mouth hangs open, rubber-tire lips overinflated, bursting. Eyes wide, the blue of them like frostbitten bodies.

The body. What can she do? When she was a girl, she and her mother bleached a rattlesnake skeleton to display above the front door, first tucking it under a blanket of water to boil, and Lo will never forget the smell, retches at the thought—heavy, bloodless, yet full of blood’s weight and memory.

Instead, she wraps the head in blankets her boyfriend hated (too scratchy) and shoves it under the sink. She tosses another over his body, flops him onto the floor.

She drags the corpse out later in the dark, rolling him onto a camping tarp and panting so hard she’s almost whimpering. It takes her all night to bury him, and she doesn’t realize she’s forgotten the head until she’s drifting off. She sleeps better than she has in months, making herself queen-size.

The first time Lo saw her mother kill a rattler is all murk in her dreams, swirls of light and heat and tongues of motion. Lo is jumping into a box, maybe a refrigerator box, covered with tracings of their hands, doodles of stick figures, and the dust covers everything, the dry scent of it, swallowing all moisture, gulping at the air. There’s a rattle from inside the box, a hiss and jumble, and Lo freezes, leg on cardboard edge, and her mother scoops her up and tumbles her into the yard, snatches a shovel and slams it down over and over, strikes until the air rings with a golden bloody hum.

Dream Lo swims to the box, discovers she’s too tall, as tall as her mother. The snake hisses, reborn, the air swollen with poison, thick with it, humid. Lo’s mother hands her the shovel, dull with blood. She takes it, Dream Lo. I’ve always wanted to do this, she says.

Don’t forget her, her mother says.

Dream Lo picks up her child self, Girl Lo, and places her in the box. She swings the shovel.

Lo wakes refreshed, aching to stretch her sleep-stiff limbs. Her boyfriend’s side of the bed rumpled from her own body, she wonders if she really did what she did last night.

She creaks into the kitchen; maybe bacon for breakfast, now seems as good a time as any to quit the whole vegan thing, can murderers be vegan anyway?

Lo’s boyfriend is sitting at the table. New head on his dirt-covered body.

Good morning, Lo-Fi, he says. The meniscus of his smirk wobbly, watery.

Her answer a reflex: I hate that nickname. She circles him, moving her body like prey, something avoiding headlights of eyes, soft and deliberate and tense. The head doesn’t track her. She examines his neck, clear except for the curved horizon of a new scar.

He continues. I’m going out with the guys after work. What’s for dinner?

Lo yanks open the sink cupboard. The bundle unmoved, the blanketed ball. She peels it, layer by layer, cracks open the whole egg, and the first head, the one she cut off yesterday, it’s still there. It starts rambling, saying something he’s said before—women are just better organizers, he can never remember when his mom’s birthday is, it’s best Lo sends the card. And the new head, still on her boyfriend’s mud-frosted body, it’s talking too, asking whether she’s ever seen Pulp Fiction, what a masterpiece, even though they watched it together and she fell asleep halfway through, and my God, he doesn’t shut up, neither of the heads does, so Lo digs out a meat cleaver and hacks his new head off.

She crams the blanketed head back under the sink; the new head, meanwhile, spews bullshit about how he can’t drink rosé even though he loves the bubbles, what would the guys say. Never skipping one syllable, not even when she wraps it in a towel and throws it in the oven. A voice still leaps through the door, talking about how Quentin Tarantino is irreplaceable.

. . .