Albert Ducharme lost his fingers, they said. Pointer on his right hand, lost. The one just next to it, also lost, though there Albert still had a stub that wiggled when he waved.
The assassin was from neither here nor there, though he spoke all their languages. He operated mostly at night time, under cover of alcohol, smoke, lust, and other elements of intoxication. He was smooth with it—baiting his targets into empty, unassuming locales.
Two days later, as he sat before a computer screen to talk to her, he thought of how their plans ceased to frighten him when a pane of glass and thousands of miles separated them both. On the phone, or on Skype, all she asked from him were words. And words, as they spilled from his mouth, revealed more about him than he thought they would.
He was going to visit her in Wellington, he repeated aloud as they drove past houses with grilled windows and dumpsters with graffiti swirls on their lids. He took Maya’s small, slender hand as they both fixed their eyes on the empty streets of West Auckland, reassuring her, when she questioned him, that he meant every word he said.
A small concrete mosque resides in the center of a residential area. Light brown, cracking paint wraps its simple geometric walls. One minaret stands erect on the southern corner, silently heaving toward the sky.
Marguerite ducked into the wind and rode the mare through the darkening valley, past the crooked shapes of abandoned homesteads and towards the sun as it slid behind the hard, perfect line that expressed a distance she hoped to one day know, but could not yet.
