Man, when it happened he just kept screaming my name saying his legs wouldn’t move. Now the cops were here, pushing the fridge out of the hallway so I could show ‘em how I shot Mike. The fridge caught a nail on the narrow walls, groaning against the floorboards and spilling spoiled groceries across the floor like a gutted pig with veins of rank milk. I gave my statement to the nearest officer, a tall man with a pronounced cleft palate–I assumed, for some reason, that he was the one in charge–and explained that I wasn’t a hoarder or anything, I just forgot about the milk is all. He yelled that the milk was fucking up his blood evidence. He yelled that he was worried, real worried about me. I watched as the milk flowed downwards across the bloody floorboards, turning pink, eventually pooling against the far door in a puddle of spilled Progresso soup. A few of the officers grumbled about the mess and complained the scene was contaminated before they even got here. A skinny one shot at a lone soup-draggled rat with what he called a “less-lethal.”

I led a few of the more eager officers into the brittle patchwork of dirt and brush that constituted Mike’s backyard. One of them shielded his eyes. Not necessary, I thought. It’s not like there were going to be any surprises. I’d already told them I did it. Stamping through knee-deep weeds and prickly briars towards the back fence, we approached Mike’s burned body, charred and coiled in a tire I’d burned. The corpse was a charcoal husk. You could barely even tell I’d blasted away his face and most of his legs.

My step-dad Pruter stepped into the yard for a smoke. He leered at the cops standing nearby, told them he suspected I’d done it over Sally. Sally, his granddaughter, my girlfriend, Mike’s tweaker companion. She’d suck Mike’s cock for a few hits of crystal and inevitably I’d hear them out back, no matter what, even over the clucking of disgruntled chickens in the coops and the muted hmmmming of Mike’s oversized AC unit. I wanted to tell ‘em to cut it out, but what could I do? Mike was my brother and a good brother shares.

At the trial, I overheard a lawyer-type (but not her actual lawyer) say they had Sally locked up in the county jail on account of they couldn’t set her free with the civilian population. Some Connecticut or New York doctor told ‘em she was traumatized. A victim. Apparently she only helped me with the Mike situation ‘cause she didn’t know any better. I thought back on that awhile later. You can’t always trust doctors. I always stopped when Sally asked me to stop. She told me I was a good man for that. She told me that a lot.

Max Tullio is a writer and filmmaker who received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Directing at Columbia University, where he was awarded the Faculty Selects prize for writing. His work has screened at dozens of festivals internationally and has appeared in publications include Forever Magazine and Speakeasy. He lives in New York City.