He Was Just Right
Mercedes Lawry

She felt she could love the detective and perhaps he could love her if he never discovered she’d committed the murder. He had a thoughtful gaze. His hands were clean. He was not too young or too old, too paunchy or too bony. In other circumstances she would have rejoiced in his being a detective and though she knew her impressions were falsely crafted by a good number of TV shows, detectives were inherently sexy.  Hence she felt this particular detective, Brad by name, could be considered sexy. She would have chosen a different name for a detective. Brad was not ideal but she could live with it. She wondered if his full name was Bradley or Bradford and if that might be a better fit. But all such discussions would come later. And were contingent, of course, on whether his detecting skills were keen enough to ferret out her crime. She knew that, in this day of forensic wonders, it was a long shot that he would fail. Additionally, there was the fact that he was not working alone. He had a “team” and one of those individuals might be exceedingly clever or intuitively gifted or just lucky. All of the evidence could line right up and point to her as the perpetrator and just as it used to occur on episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, her husband’s name would be changed from red to black, with a flourish of erasure in between. And she would not be loving Brad the detective and he would not be loving her, although he might harbor a nagging fondness that would take years to disappear, after she had been noisily executed or had adjusted well to life in prison, earning a master’s of divinity, publishing in peer-reviewed journals and garnering both scorn and respect from fellow inmates as well as from underpaid guards.

About the author:
Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, The Saint Ann’s Review, and others.  Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she’s published two chapbooks, most recently “Happy Darkness”. She’s also published short fiction, essays and stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.