12

At 12 years old it took 12 days to find
her body in the dumpster. 12 times
she’d texted him; he said he’d sell her, cheap,
new gears for her BMX bike. The details of what he did
are none of your business. Death is more than the pornography of the coroner’s
     report
after the first commercial break of every CSI episode. What I care about is
that bike, that girl on that bike, that girl who loved
the speed and the dust and who couldn’t conceive that a boy offering parts
didn’t care about the bike, not even enough
to hide it well. She loved that bike. Is it possible she knows
         he didn’t break
            it,
       didn’t harm
            it,
that her father cleaned it carefully and hung it on the pegs in her room, adorned
with her gloves and knee pads? No helmet hanging there yet;
the electric blue one she always wore on her head,
which they keep trying to force me to
       bury her
            without.

What I care about is not her death,
but his. It haunts me, how he died. How her bike, tossed into
a woodchipper, became a half million splinters of steel, how I bought
a bamboo tube just long enough at the garden store, how I texted him the
     offer of
a blow job—Ha!—and then gave him one, tying his wrists, ripping down his
     pants, blowing
those splinters hard into his penis, his balls and how when
     the blood flowed
it occurred to me that her blood might have been also once there so how I
cut it off, how I hooked the tube to an air compressor and how the steel
     fragments sank
so easily into his belly, his chest, his neck, his face. How I considered,
     before he died,
shoving his own porcupine of a penis into his own ass, but didn’t because
I couldn’t figure out the logistics of its limpness.

What I care about is how this doesn’t bring her back and how now her bike
is gone, too. She loved that bike. In those long 12 days I painted this picture of
     her racing,
to show the cops, to show the media, to drag her safely back home to me
     behind
each brush stroke. I painted this picture, and I shoved it in his face and I let his
     blood
rush down onto it and I saw what I had made and I pronounced it good, on the
     evening
         and the morning
            of the 13th day.