THESAURUS PAPERCUTS.

By Megan Cannella

CW: murder

A man called my sentences lapidary, and honestly, I’ve never wanted to fuck anyone more than I wanted to fuck that adjective in that moment. But I don’t know what the word means, so I googled it. I’ve wanted to fuck enough words from the mouths of enough strangers to know that lust should be verified. Especially word lust, because the right syllables with the right tone can mean anything and everything and nothing.

Something about cutting or carving but as it relates to jewels, which lends a voluptuous languidity (is that the word I’m thinking of? Sounds sexy as hell even if it isn’t) to the situation that I can appreciate.

Less the ability to fuck words—or a worthy tongue on which to place those words, an altar for word fucking, which left too long in the sun sours into mindfucking—I leave my telehealth therapist a message about how I think I compulsively check to make sure my front door is locked before I go to sleep each night because my mentor from undergrad was murdered by her son, and my friend’s brother who once sent me flowers on Valentine’s Day stabbed his ex-wife to death, and they made a Dateline special about him. And it has only just occurred to me that those women were both murdered in their sleep.

They woke up, and the person they love(d) was killing them.

I still use the box those Valentine’s Day flowers came in to hold old mix CDs. It is on the floor of my car buried under all the things that have slid forward when I have hit the brakes too quickly, or as quickly as life has demanded. The CDs are all in the wrong cases, if they’re in cases at all. They are scratched to the point that only my least favorite tracks will play anymore, but they were my most favorite songs at one time, so I listen to them anyway, out of respect—for the song, for the me I was when I burned this CD.

Eventually, my therapist responds. She agrees this is not what she was expecting when she went to listen to my messages. She assures me that I am more likely to die while driving a car than I am to die by murder. I can tell from the background noise of her recording that she is driving as she says this. The recording cuts off. I wonder if she is dead now too.

She isn’t. She just hit the 5 minute recording limit. She starts anew. She is still driving.

I haven’t finished listening to the four messages she sent me. I don’t know that she has survived therapizing me. I stopped after Message Two when she asks me to say more about the murders and how they made me feel.

Really fucking bad.

Bad but not surprised—which is the worst kind of bad to feel in this kind of situation, in case you were wondering.

His ex-wife was murdered. She was stabbed. The evidence was disposed of in the most obvious, sloppiest way. I can’t help but wonder if he has ever watched Law & Order. I feel bad about having this thought. I’m not sure I’d have felt better if he had committed an efficient murder. But who can say now? All these thoughts and never once did I consider he didn’t do it.

His (a different his this time) mother, my mentor, didn’t show up to work. But academics aren’t always on campus everyday—especially not tenured academics. But Susan was more reliable than most academics, more formidable too. Her absence was noticed. She was murdered. She was stabbed. The evidence was disposed of in the most obvious, sloppiest way. I can’t help but wonder if he has ever watched Law & Order. I feel bad about having this thought. I’m not sure I’d have felt better if he had committed an efficient murder. But who can say now? All these thoughts and never once did I consider he didn’t do it.

When my therapist says I’m more likely to die in a car accident than by murder, as she continues talking and driving, I can’t help but cite these two examples. Maybe their deaths make me less likely to die. I’m not sure how the numbers work here. I will stick to the cutting and polishing of words.

When you know a Dateline special, can you view life though any other lens? Is Keith Morrison always going to be narrating my walks to my car at night? Will he tell viewers that in the moment between when I opened the door of my darkened house and when I turned on the light I think only of the urban legend I read in some Accelerated Reader book in middle school, where a woman doesn’t turn on the lights before going to bed, and thus doesn’t see a horrifying message written on the wall in her dead roommate’s blood. There was a Supernatural episode about this too, which only confirmed for me that it could happen.

My therapist says I’m only ever as safe as I am. She laughs. Does this help she asks, to herself in her car, but also to me.

I can’t imagine how it would help. I can’t imagine this woman’s sentences have ever been called lapidary.

I stop listening to her messages. I go back to flirting with this man who lives in my DMs. He just appeared one day with his luscious compliments about my bawdy words. He is little more than a thesaurus to me. Though, there are obvious limitations presented at the thought of fucking a thesaurus. I take my chances and think of him as a man. I’m confident he won’t stab me to death in my sleep. Mostly because he doesn’t know where I live. I wonder how much Law & Order he’s watched.

I wonder how closely he paid attention.

I wonder when is the sexiest time for me to ask these questions.

Megan Cannella (she/her) is a Midwestern transplant currently living in Nevada. Her debut chapbook, Confrontational Crotch and Other Real Housewives Musings, is out now: https://linktr.ee/mcannella. You can find Megan on Twitter at @megancannella.