I looked at its skin, the destroyed web of burnt tissue that covered it like a grotesque lace veil, and thought, How poetic. My wife had finally let the flame inside consume her.
I still held the coat out towards her.
“Did you ever love me?” I asked, and I knew I sounded as pathetic as the dull Nebraskan boy she considered me to be.
The monster Miranda had become pressed its lips together and favored me with a tight smile. I thought for one wild moment it was going to say something kind.
“Oh, Arthur,” Lady Alligator murmured. “Can an eagle love a worm? Can the brilliant sun love a dirty light bulb in a truckstop bathroom? Darling, you’ve always known that you captured me like a firefly in a jar. You thought if you didn’t poke holes in the lid I’d be content to suffocate in your sweaty grasp but you dropped the glass and I escaped. And now I’m where I was always meant to be.”
It said this with the deliberate patience of a mother explaining something to an especially dimwitted child. I felt it, then – the anger that had roiled my guts when I opened the drawer and saw the money missing from the Gideon bible. Not because she’d robbed me, but because she’d deceived me. She made me believe she loved me and she left me and I grieved for her, god damn it, I grieved in my own way as though I’d been made a widower and the whole fucking time she was laughing at me.
“I bring in thousands,” it went on. “They come from all corners of the world to see me. I’m the star attraction here. I can have any man I want.”
You’re a selfish whoremonster in a dirty bathtub, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
Miranda’s eyes, a shade of alien gold in the flickering glow of lit candles, squinted at me.
“You’re just the same as you’ve always been,” it said, a lilt of disappointment in its voice. “Such a terrible bore.”
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