Page 7 of Trigger Happy

I sway on my feet a little and grab the pigpen’s wood railing for support. The hay on the floor is starting to spin again, but I’m used to the feeling now. Doesn’t even make me nauseous anymore.

The intestines, though? That has me queasy.

“Chastain could never deal with this shit. Right, Carnitas?” I say to my pig.

He snorts.

“Exactly.” I jab a finger at him, almost trip, but catch myself. “She’s too fuckin’ busy sipping that pink weed seltzer she likes while plotting on her twenty-four-carat-gold bidet that was probably passed down through the generations.”

Another snort.

Knew he’d agree. Carnitas is my guy.

Sabrina’s face jumps into my head to pester me like the ranch’s cicadas that make it their mission to burst my eardrums. They won’t shut up until the weather cools off. I drag a thumb over the scar she left on my eyebrow, and that familiar brew of anger, annoyance, resentment, whatever you want to call it, boils over.

“Damn you, Chastain. Get outta my head.”

All that brown—bronde—hair she dyes, those lips that could make a corpse do a triple take, and that thin scar on her right cheekbone she got from a knife fight. It’s the only part of her face that’s banged up.

I blame her hundred-step skin-care routine.

And I don’t want to talk about those hooded, smoky eyes that always make her look like she just got laid. What color are they, anyway? Gray? Blue? Green?

Every time I stare at them, I want to scoop my eyeballs out with a melon-baller thanks to our fucked-up families.

Do we have cold, hard proof Chastain’s mom killed Walker? No, but who needs proof when her fingerprints were all over his place, and he turns up dead the next morning?

“Accident my ass,” I mutter.

Why was her mom at his apartment? Walker probably did something to piss her off, maybe got blood on her dry-cleaned cashmere, and she killed him for it because she’s a psychopath who doesn’t know the meaning of too far.

Before all this, Sabrina and I had a fun rivalry going. She would bedazzle my favorite cowboy hat, so I’d slip a food-poisoning pill into her seltzer and she’d spend hours hunched over the toilet.

Like I said—fun.

I didn’t hate them.

But now it’s personal.

“You want some lime, hon?” Ma hollers from the wraparound porch. Her voice carries over the oak trees that remind me of giant broccoli heads. It’s got a way to go. My parents have sixty-two acres of pasture that roll down to the Rio Grande.

I cup one bloody hand around my mouth and shout through the open barn doors. “For what? Margaritas?”

“ ’Course not!” she yells, perching her hands on her apron. “To help speed up the decomposition process!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I yell back, holding up a thumb. “Bring on the corpse ceviche!”

Quicklime—not lime juice—helps the remains decay faster (at least, at first), which makes my job easier. She blows me a kiss before letting the screen door swing closed, and I pretend to catch it in the air because it makes her smile. I might have a hard time getting out of bed these days, but I can make her grin.

Ma used to be a big smiler, but when Walker died over a year ago, she traded in her smiles for chores. Cleaning her guns, organizing the knives, shoveling hay, you name it. Once when she was having a rough day, she painted the porch the most disgusting shade of yellow because Walker liked bananas, so now I call my childhood home “The Piss-stain.”

In my head, not out loud.

Ma’s been through enough.

The paint didn’t last long, but her smiles came back. I always wonder how she managed that, but I guess some people push grief away and others get stuck in it. Most days I’d rather stay in bed, let the dishes stack up, and replay the voice memos Walker left me, but she wouldn’t understand that.

Now the paint’s peeling next to the wicker rocking chairs. The ranch used to be home, but with Walker gone, I live out of my duffel because, unlike Ma, the Motel 6 manager doesn’t side-eye me when I stay in bed until three in the afternoon.