Teenage Serial Killers

He bit the heads off sun-bleached flies

While she gnawed at a hangnail

There was so much time to kill 

In the meantime of their lives

He took an axe to his favorite parts

And she set flame to boys’ second-hand cars and bike tires

One time, in the purgatory of late August

When the heat was a temptress, 

Making grown men weak in the knees

Sweat pooling at lower spines

She stole the keys to Eugene Lilac’s 

2006 Camry and licked it with propane 

A renegade with box-blonde unwashed waves

Her hangnail bled the whole way home

Pedaling that bike she swiped

From the 7-Eleven after Thomas Sultan 

Strode in with a fake ID and $9 in quarters 

There was so much time to die

Between now and the rest of their lives

None of the flies protested

They knew inevitability even better 

Than she did

He passed her one

And there they sat, on the pavement by the freeway

With skid-marked thighs 

Counting hours until even the sun

Expired with boredom 

She said a prayer for every fly he caught

Hands always full of tiny, gruesome things

She gave him girlhood to hold once

But even he was too repulsed 

So she kept it in the pocket of her hip

Where it jostled and somersaulted from time to time 

As she cackled at the sight of dented doors and steering wheels on fire

A revenge of sorts

For all the boys’ attempts to steal 

What she tucked away in her right hip

For safekeeping 

She promised to give it freely

If only they were kind to her

For the length of purgatory’s aftertaste 

Eventually

All the boys stopped knocking on her door, 

The one with the hole in its screen, the size of a father’s fist

She told herself it was because all their rides were now ash 

In the pond behind the high school football field 

But when the night settled in,

Sky the color of a two-day-old bruise

She knew that wasn’t why