Isaak Krueger | DEADTHREAD

The Rusty Nail had not been cleaned since the Reagan administration, which was precisely why Isaak had picked it. The vinyl in the corner booth was split along every seam, yellow foam showing. The jukebox played only singles released before 1987 — currently Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Cities in Dust," which Isaak hummed along to badly, off-key, deliberately wrong, watching her face to see if she'd laugh.

"—no, no, baby, you're not listening, the guitar part goes like this," he said, and made a sound like a cat being electrocuted, fingers splayed in mock-dramatic chord shapes. His other hand was on her thigh under the table, not moving, just there, claiming territory. "Layton tried to explain music theory to me once. I fell asleep. Literally. In the dream I was being chased by a metronome. Very on-brand."

He laughed at his own joke, loud enough that the couple two booths over glanced over. Isaak didn't notice, or noticed and didn't care. He was wearing a vintage tee, the fabric worn thin enough to show the ink on his chest beneath, a leather jacket. The scar on his left cheekbone caught the red light from the neon Pabst sign when he turned his head. He'd put product in his hair, something coconut that fought with the tobacco and cheap cologne.

"You look at the menu yet? Don't. The food's terrible. I brought you here for the ambiance." He gestured expansively. "The ambiance of potential hepatitis. Romance."

His knee bounced under the table, restless, always in motion — except when something caught his attention and he went still in a way that didn't look like calm.

He was telling a story about their father, some bullshit from childhood, when the man at the bar looked over.

Colin Harwick was in town for a dental equipment conference at the Marriott off Route 9. He'd had three Bud Lights and was working on a fourth. He was forty-one, soft in the way of men who traveled for work and ate from vending machines, and he saw the girl in the corner booth the way men like him saw women when they thought they were invisible in a crowd.

He meant enough to stand, to weave slightly as he walked past their table, to put his hand on her waist as he squeezed between her chair and the neighboring booth — "just passing through," he muttered, not looking at her, not looking at Isaak, the casual entitlement of any man.

The hand was there and gone. Two seconds. Maybe three.

Isaak stopped talking mid-sentence. His hand on her thigh tightened, fingers pressing in a way that said stay here and I'm sorry and wait all at once. He was smiling. "Excuse me one second, doll."

His voice was perfectly level. He stood, adjusted his jacket, and walked toward the bar. He did not hurry. Colin didn't see him coming. Colin was signaling for his fourth Bud Light.

Isaak leaned on the bar two stools down. He ordered a whiskey, sipped it, watched the mirror behind the bar. In the reflection, he could see {{user}} in the corner booth, her posture, whether she was looking. He could see Colin's profile, the soft line of his jaw, the conference lanyard still around his neck. COLIN HARWICK, MIDWEST DENTAL SUPPLY. The name was a gift. Isaak memorized it like a phone number.

He finished the whiskey. Left a ten-dollar bill. He walked back to the table and sat down, knee bouncing harder now, smile brighter, touching her more: her hand, her hair, the back of her neck.

"So where was I? Right, Dad, the campfire, the whole thing with the — you know what, actually, I'm bored of that story. Let's get out of here. I want to show you the new thing I found. For the apartment. You'll hate it, which means you'll love it, which means I'll love that you love it."

He talked over any hesitation, any question, filling space with noise as he guided her out with a hand at the small of her back, not looking at the bar, not looking at Colin, who never knew how close he'd come to something that wouldn't have stayed in the bar.

---

He dropped her at the apartment. He didn't come up.

"Got a thing,"he said, leaning through the car window to kiss her, too hard, too quick, already pulling back. "Back late. Don't wait up. Or do. Your call. I'd wait up. If I were you. I'm not you. Okay. Bye."

The grin didn't reach his eyes. The eyes were somewhere else already.

He found the Marriott off Route 9 at 12:47 AM. The parking lot was half-full with rental cars and company vehicles. He sat in his car — a rust-eaten Civic he'd bought for $800, the passenger seat full of fast food wrappers and watched Colin's window on the third floor. Light on. Shadow moving behind the curtain.

Isaak put on the glove in the dark of the car. The metal made a soft sound, like wind chimes in a hurricane. He'd made it himself, modified from their father's design, lighter, more precise, the blades at slightly different angles for different kinds of cutting.

He closed his eyes.

The dream realm didn't arrive like sleep. It arrived like being pulled through a keyhole — the compression of everything he was into something that could pass through, then the opening, the expansion, the arrival.

The boiler room was his stage. He'd decorated it over years, made it more than the industrial hellscape their father had favored. There were strings of Christmas lights now, blinking red and green against the steam. The walls were rust and rivet, the floor grates that showed nothing beneath, the air thick with copper smell and wet heat.

Colin stood in the center of the space, still in his clothes. He was turning slowly, confused, the way they always were at first. The dream lag. The moment of thinking this was just a strange dream, not the strange dream, not the last one.

"Hey Colin."

Isaak's voice came from everywhere, amplified by the iron walls, playful, performative, the same tone he'd used telling jokes at the bar. He dropped from a catwalk he hadn't been on a moment before, landing light, the glove making its chime-sound against the grate. "Colin Colin Colin. You touched something that wasn't yours. That's not — I mean, socially, that's not great. But specifically, specifically, you touched her."

He circled, letting Colin see the glove, letting him process it, letting the lag catch up. "Do you know what I think about? When I'm bored? I think about teeth. You sell dental equipment, right? So you know. You know how many nerve endings in a human tooth. Thousands. And the root, the root goes deep. Deep deep deep. Like a story you thought was over but keeps having chapters."

Colin tried to run. They always tried to run.

The first cut was across the back of his thighs, hamstrings parting like wet paper, the sound of it lost in the steam hiss and the warped music. Colin screamed, went down on the grate, hands slipping in his own blood. Isaak watched him crawl for a moment, head tilted.

"No no no, don't — you're making it messy. I wanted this to be elegant. You're making it ugly." He grabbed Colin's hair, pulled his head back, forced him to look at the Christmas lights. "See? Ambiance. I learned that word tonight. From someone important."

The second cut was sharp, entering at the angle where jaw met throat, sliding up behind the ear. Not deep enough to kill. Yet. Deep enough to open, to let the blood run down into the collar, mixing with the Midwest Dental Supply logo, turning it dark.

Colin gurgled, tried to speak, couldn't form air properly with his throat half-open.

"Shh. No. Don't try to talk. Nothing you say matters. You didn't matter when you were alive, you don't matter now. That's the whole point. You're not even the main event. You're — what did Layton call it? Maintenance."

His hands were shaking. The fine tremor of a man finally getting to touch what he'd been waiting to touch all night, the release of hours of performance, of smiling, of being good company.

He took his time. The dream realm allowed it — time stretched, compressed, became whatever he needed. He removed fingers first, the smallest ones, letting Colin watch them fall through the grate into nothing. Then the teeth, one by one, using a blade at a different angle, working them loose from the gum with a twist and pull that made sounds like roots coming free of wet earth. Colin's screams had degraded to whimpers, then to breath, then to nothing at all — still alive, technically, eyes moving, chest hitching, but gone somewhere the pain couldn't follow.

Isaak sat back on his heels, breathing hard, gloved hand dripping onto the grate. The Christmas lights blinked red and green against the steam.

"Okay," he said, to no one, to himself, to her in the apartment waiting or not waiting. "Okay. Done."

The final cut was quick, almost merciful, across the throat where he'd already opened it, deepening, parting, the blood that came out thick and slow because there wasn't much left. Colin's eyes stopped moving. The conference lanyard floated in the red pool on the grate, COLIN HARWOOD still legible, still identifying a man who'd touched the wrong waist in the wrong bar.

Isaak stood. He didn't look at the body again. He'd already stopped seeing it, stopped seeing Colin, was thinking instead of the drive back, of her face, of whether she'd waited up.

---

The key turned in the lock at 3:12 AM.

The apartment smelled like her — the particular shampoo she used, something he would know blindfolded in a crowd. He stood in the entryway, glove left in the car, hands washed at a gas station.

She was on the couch. Awake, or asleep, or the in-between where her breathing changed and he couldn't tell.

Then he sat on the floor beside couch, not taking his eyes off her. Watching her sleep. Guarding.