How to Kill Your Best Friend

Which I suppose it should be; if you're going to kill someone, you shouldn't be insulating yourself from the process. That was always my objection to the use of drones: warfare ought to be immediate; it ought to be bloody, to be close combat. You should be forced to witness, to feel, each and every impact. You shouldn't be allowed to put it at arm's length.

Platitudes, both his words and mine, and we both know it --- the reckoning is yet to come. But in the meantime we're operating on a surface level of civility that's nothing short of excruciating.

I'm being hung for a crime I didn't commit, but getting off scot-free with one I did.

HOW TO KILL YOUR BEST FRIEND Method 4: Electrocution Hair dryer dropped in a bath tub? I suppose it's just about believable and I could probably engineer such a situation. But I Googled it (not on my own device, of course), and it seems that it's actually very unlikely to be fatal. Electricity is lazy; it seeks the path of least resistance. The current will almost certainly run to ground through the bathwater and the bath plug, rather than through the cardiac tissue, meaning that the only thing that gets successfully fried is the bath salts. How else can you engender a fatal electrocution? With difficulty, according to the Google search results. There are too many variables. AC or DC current. Wet or dry hands. The material of the shoes the person is wearing. Whether the current finds a way to breach the skin to reach the soft, vulnerable, unresistant tissues inside-and how much water and how much fat are in those tissues. The more I look at this, the more I realize how exceedingly difficult it is to kill a person-without immediately getting caught, I mean. Which is, ordinarily, a good thing, one supposes. Though not much help to me now.

Dunc shudders again. "Even for Lissa, that's completely over the top," he says. "Really? Tell me, Dunc, what is the proportionate response to in- fidelity?" Georgie asks with faux sweetness. "Oh, come on-" Dunc starts. "A slap in the face? Or is that just for kissing? What about a blow job, is that two slaps?

Back at the table, Adam has shifted to sit next to Georgie, filling my spot. Their heads are together, and even though one is blond and one dark, there's something remarkably similar in their lean, sparse bone structure, in the tilt of their necks. They look up to see me at exactly the same time, reflected lamplight gleaming in their liquid eyes, as if they are two heads of the same beast.

Now that I'm directing my attention straight at her, it's hard not to look at her crotch, given her cross- legged position. Her black bikini briefs are perfectly in place, without a hair, or even a follicle, to be seen. I wonder if she waxes everywhere? Or if she's had electrolysis? I've heard that's the norm for singletons in the US-the Tinder generation. A doctor friend told me that even in the UK, everybody he sees under the age of thirty is entirely de- void of pubic hair these days.

His resentment toward me has gone, at least, although I'm not sure what he's replaced it with. His jaw is tight as he looks across at me with those strange eyes. "She was just scaring him, right? She wouldn't actually have cut it off?" I almost laugh. That he could have married her married her! and be so oblivious. Are all marriages like this? Is it in fact a neces sary attribute in order for a marriage to survive: some kind of willing suspension of critical thought, so that the person you see before you is the person you WANT to see?

I know now. I know how to kill your best friend. You have to go down with her; there isn't any other way.

We all have hidden spaces within us. Secrets to be kept, for everyone’s sake.

There are things you can only talk about in person, late at night, softened by a blanket of darkness and alcohol.

My husband died, and I thought I couldn't go on living. And then I found out that even before that, you'd stolen him. There's not enough sorrow in the world to atone for that.