“OMW” Mila texted.

“Same” Vivian replied.

After a while, Vivian texted. “Made it. Boat left. Where are you?”

Mila’s heart dropped as she realized she was too late. She spent weeks convincing her friend Vivian to be her plus one for the company’s sunset boat trip, followed by dinner and dancing.

Mila sent a crying emoji.

“WTF Mila! I’m stuck here with YOUR colleagues!” Vivian’s message ended with several angry emojis.

Mila could only stick around on shore, wait for the boat to return and practice her apologies.

Finally, the boat docked. Was that Vivian? Mila squinted.

Adan, a gentle, nerdy coworker was reaching for Vivian’s hand to help her disembark. Once on land, he twirled Vivian around and kissed her hand. It would have been corny if not for their beaming energy.

Mila relaxed. This could still turn out to be a fantastic evening.

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A highlight of my playdates is when I get to use my French mandolin, a kitchen utensil I’m particularly fond of. It’s a souvenir from my six-month culinary school exchange program in Paris. My fellow students and I divided our time between ecstatic nights out and long hours spent cutting, boning, gutting, cleaning, and preparing meats, poultry, fish, vegetables, and various other foods.

I acquired the mandolin during a short trip to Nice. As I wandered among the bustling market stands at the Cours Saleya, I spotted a craftsman selling handmade utensils. After striking up a conversation, confirming his ability to make tailor-made adjustments and placing my order, I continued my stroll through the narrow streets of the historic city center with a newfound spring in my step.

On the morning of my departure from Nice back to Paris, I hurried back to the market. The man handed over the mandolin. I inspected it from a horizontal angle, nodding approvingly. The man had beamed with pride. “This blade is sharp, with a tight angle. Other mandolins slice vegetables paper-thin. Not this one, Monsieur, this blade will slice a hair.”

He had been right. The slices are exceptionally thin. The mandolin extends the time it takes to scrape off layer after layer of human skin, muscle, and flesh before I reach the bones of my female playdates. Every now and then, their cries stop when they pass out. I have my ways to revive them. Ten fingers and ten toes, each a copious source of rapturous pleasure.

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“High five!” she said. The little boy stood on tiptoes to reach her hand, slapping his hand against hers. She stooped down to his level and pressed her fingers together.

“Baby five!” he shrieked, bumping his tiny pressed fingers into hers. The boy giggled with delight at their usual goodbyes.

When he laughed, which he often did, he exposed some of his already rotten milk teeth. She had urged the boy’s mother to buy a toothbrush. The mother did. The toothbrush disappeared within days, most likely nicked by a visiting family member or neighbor.

She reached her car and sighed. In her early career, she had bought toothbrushes and soap bars for some of her clients. Eventually she stopped. There were so many kids, so many needs.

“Poverty persists,” she thought, recalling how this boy’s young mother had once been one of the children she had given a toothbrush.

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She kept twirling incessantly in the opposite direction of Earth’s rotation.

She couldn’t stop. Exhausted, she breathed in the sour hospital smells.

Stopping meant giving in to the direction and pace of Earth’s rotational pull.

She wouldn’t give in. Light-headed, she struggled to maintain her balance.

Giving in, meant surrendering to life’s scripted path.

Following that path, meant facing the diagnosis. Nauseous, she battled the rising bile.

Facing the diagnosis, meant facing death.

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Line items 5, 33, 46, 62 and 78 were the ones he had to authorize. He had checked and double-checked each fabricated payee and its payment details.

These would be the final transactions. He would then reinvest the funds in stable bonds—boring bonds, as his wife would say.

They had married in their early thirties, taking out a considerable loan to satisfy her desire for a grand wedding in a historic building with a large garden, abundant flower decorations, and an open bar for their 500 guests.

In the following years, his thrill-seeking wife regularly cheated on him. At least one instance involved a lower-ranking colleague whom she seduced during a company retreat. That time, he made sure the guy got fired over some other triviality.

Dependability was what he was known for, trusted for, continuously promoted for. It didn’t grant him a faithful wife, but it did provide him with ample payment authorization limits at the company.

He knew she wouldn’t leave him. She thrived on the attention that came with being a pillar of society. A lifestyle funded entirely by his dependability.

He could not leave her because the tremor in his hands and the numbness in his left leg were getting worse every morning.

He had overinvested in the tropical hardwood investment project, silencing the warnings of his inner voice. He had been swept up in the “gung-ho” fervor of the carefully curated group of premium investors. A group so carefully curated, that except for him, all had one thing in common: they had been in on the scam.

Line items 5, 33, 46, 62, and 78.

As long as there was money, the prenup guaranteed her presence until his final, wheezing breath.

He clicked ‘Approve’.

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She’s not a monster.

She feeds me, though she also feeds on my kind.

When she leaves, I escape my watery cage and expand my limbs.

I sit on her balcony.

The sunlight warms my scaled skin.

I gossip with the pigeons. We laugh.

At dusk, I splash back home.

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“Tyler, right?” the recruiter asked.

Tyler nodded. “Yes.”

“We do a background check during the resume screening. You passed the identity verification and the AI assisted plagiarism check.” The recruiter paused.

She continued: “We monitor you during the next recruitment steps.”

Tyler glanced at the ceiling camera.

“We analyze your physical and online activity while on our premises, including your phone usage.”

Tyler dried his sweaty palms on his legs.

“Our AI identified inconsistencies between your recent writing samples that you wrote while at our office and those online, as well as discrepancies in your physical appearance in meetings with us, compared to photos and videos previously posted online.”

Tyler swallowed, tasting bile in his mouth.

The recruiter leaned forward. “Finally, our generative speech analysis compared your online voice to your demeanor here. We combined and analyzed the data. Let’s start over. Who are you?”

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The pool of blood under the metal butcher’s block is the only physical reminder left of her. A sigh escapes my lips. In the end, she had died too quickly for my liking. Thankfully, her pleading whimpers and terrified shrieks still echo around in my playroom, much like a soothing, background music.

I’ve already cleaned the fully tiled walls with a pressure-washer. My hooks, tongs, boning knives, even my favorite mandolin for my work on the skin of the extremities, are all meticulously clean. I’ve cleared the floor drain of any leftover hairs, bone fragments and other bodily remains.

Feeling increasingly satisfied, I can’t help but hum the opening lines of my favorite song by ‘The Temptations’. My humming quickly turns into giddy singing: “I’ve got sunshine,… on a cloudy day….” The familiar tingling in my body starts, and before I know it, I am performing the ‘Temptation Walk’, swaying to the tune of this song that I know so well from my youth.

My dad and I would dance to this song in our living room, every time after he had told me, with wide-open sparkling eyes, that another one of the many ‘auntie’s’ he brought home wouldn’t be visiting us anymore.

He was the one who taught me that expressing my interest in a girl with a well-timed reference to this timeless classic song would almost always make her let her guard down.

All set! I’m ready to hit the bars tonight. I can’t wait to meet my next girl and, soon, welcome her into my playroom.

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Sonja still felt stunned that she had managed to slip away from her regular grocery store, her full cart left abandoned. She had gone to the other, pricier store. Finishing up, and finally at ease, Sonja warmly greeted the cashier.

Suddenly, a familiar silhouette grabbed her attention. The woman’s preying eyes immediately locked on Sonja. Sonja froze as the woman hurried straight towards her. She was stuck between the next person in line and the guy packing her groceries.

The woman, now blocking her passageway, hissed menacingly, “Sonja, there you are. Why aren’t you answering my messages?”

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Slowly, I licked the inside of her underarm, from her wrist up to her elbow. I pressed my tongue firmly against her skin, savoring every inch. I could feel her blood pounding in her arteries.

I glanced at her face: nostrils flaring, her skin soaked with sweat, tears and blood. Through the gag, I could hear her whimper. The sounds sent waves of delight up my spine.

She looked at me with her remaining eye, the brown pupil fully dilated in a bloodshot eyeball.

The closer I got to the elbow joint, the more she shook, her body trembling violently. She had quickly learned the rules of my game. She knew my next cut would be right below the joint.

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