Mercy by Cerissa DiValentino

Cecile asks Frederic how he’d kill her if he had to and he doesn’t hesitate to answer. They’re in the kitchen, which opens onto the living room, and it all belongs to her. She pays the rent, and he stays there sometimes. He’s standing beside the window, smoking a cigarette with his head crooked towards the sky. It was raining when they woke that morning, and she would have stayed in bed all day beside him, his middle finger trailing her spine. He’d asked what she did yesterday while he was gone. She told him: she went to work, came home, made dinner, and spoke with her mother before going to sleep. She didn’t ask him what he did. She can’t. They didn’t stay in bed like she’d wanted to, the rain stopped, and he can’t ever be still. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a mug with a chipped lip. She presses her mouth against the jagged edge as Frederic starts to say how he’d kill her. He turns his head from the window, the smoke from his cigarette moving out into the day behind him. He sets his eyes on her.

“I’d tell you we were going to have a nice day at the beach,” he says. “I’d pack a blanket, a bottle of wine, and Spanish olives because they’re your favorite. We’d rent a car and go somewhere far from here, to the real beaches. I’d put the radio on and let you choose the station. Then we’d get to the beach and find a secluded spot on the sand, have the whole place to ourselves. We’d drink down the wine and I’d tell you how beautiful you are. I’d talk about our children and you’d tell me that list of names again. We’d talk about moving out of this city and raising them in the woods with philosophy and music. They’d sleep in the bed with us, and we’d all take showers together. And in that house with the red door, because I know you’d paint it red, we’d raise the greatest musician of the twenty-first century, or the next president, or an actress because they’d look like us, have your lips and my black hair and your green eyes. When we’d finish talking, I’d lay you on the blanket and make love to you. I’d make sure it felt good. And then I’d take your hand and walk you down to the water. I’d stand back and look at you as the sun went down. You’d be looking at the ocean. I’d shoot you in the back of the head.”

Cecile has removed the mug from her face, but now there’s a tremor in her lip. She thinks something about him has changed. While he spoke, the sun disappeared behind a cloud, but now it’s back and stronger, the crown of his dark hair burning in an orange halo. His brow ridge is denser, his eyes like two black marbles. She sits with her hands in her lap and wishes the rain would return. His mouth is set open as if he wants to laugh. She wants to laugh along with him because the last time she didn’t he disappeared for two weeks. A few months before, he’d pounded on the door as if he were trying to hurt her. She dropped the mug and hid before realizing it was a joke. The flesh in her nose burns again as she tries to halt the tears.

“Cecile,” he says. “Don’t cry on me, woman. I love you. I don’t even own a gun.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, forcing a smile. She thinks it was the sun that made him look like a stranger. She wipes beneath her eyes and blinks to make the tears go away. “That’s beautiful, but maybe it’s a little too real. Have you thought about this before?”

He tosses his finished cigarette through the window and walks over to her, pulling a chair from the table and then sitting with his legs spread. He kneels forward and takes her hands. She thinks that he might ask her to marry him. If he were going to do it, he’d do it in his own way, not on his knee but sitting in the chair—though a good man, she thinks, would be more likely to get down. They’ve talked about getting married before. But he doesn’t want to until he’s deep into his thirties. And they’re still a few years out. She’s twenty-four. He’s twenty-nine. When he stops kissing her hands, he says, “I’m at your mercy, woman. I’d let you kill me first if anything was going to happen to me.”

She laughs but it comes out broken and sore, more like the sound of a child after a baby tooth has been pulled. “I don’t want to kill you,” she says, lolling her hand in the air. “Frankly, I’d rather jump out of that window than have to watch them lower you into the ground. Just don’t talk about that day again. It’s too real, Frederic.”

He moves his hand behind her neck and holds it there tightly while he uses the other hand to push her hair back. When he speaks, he gives her a shake, as if each idea is a quarter, and she’s a pinball machine with a sticky insert. “A man has to think about these things, Cecile. I have to protect the ones I love, and if for some reason, you were going to die, and I couldn’t stop it, then I’d prefer to do it myself. Doesn’t that sound nice? You’d be looking at the ocean. I promise you wouldn’t feel a thing.”

He holds their faces close. She can see her reflection in his pupils. There’s a green plume around them in which she sees her father and his eyes. All through her childhood, her father wrote letters for her before heading to work. At the bottom of each one, he asked how her day went and made two boxes. When he returned, one of the boxes was expected to be marked. The first box was: Best Day Ever. The second box was: There’s Always Tomorrow. Her father is dying of a brain tumor now, but Frederic doesn’t know that. When she makes her trips home, she tells him that she’s seeing her old friends, her old life, and he doesn’t ask questions or say that he wants to join. She’s fine with this because her father wouldn’t like him. But she wishes Frederic was the kind of man who’d sit by his bedside with her, making some joke about how her father is more of a man than he is because he’s got more mass with the cancer cells. Maybe they’d find that funny, and one day her father would live. But Frederic is a man she met when she needed someone to kiss her and now she’s too tired to find someone better. And anyway, her father won’t be going home. Most of the time, she’s able to pack this down, but as Cecile looks at Frederic, his calloused fingers digging into the top of her spine, she wishes, for very different reasons, that he and her father were not the men that they are.

“I am going to die though,” she says. “Isn’t that true? I could walk out of this apartment and a bus could kill me. Or some crazy man could follow me home and then drag me into an alleyway and rape me, Frederic. He could strangle me with his hands, and I’d die before you could do anything to stop it. I could grow old. You could take me to the beach today with that argument. I’m not sure that I want to know how you’d kill me.”

He furrows his eyebrows and frowns. He moves backwards in his chair but keeps a hand on her knee. He presses his thumb hard against the bone. “Why did you ask me then?”

“You were at the window,” she says, trying to endure the pain from his pressure. “And I thought you looked handsome, but in a disheveled way, you know. With your undereye bags and fucked up hair, and there’s a stain on your shirt. You were looking at the sky and I was wondering what you were thinking. I spend a lot of time wondering what goes on inside of your head. You come and go, and I wish you’d stay put. I think about what you do when you’re out there, and there’s a chip in that cup. Look at the cup, Frederic.”

He squints at the cup like she said something in a language he can’t understand.

“I like putting my lips against it sometimes because it hurts. But most of the time, I just wish it didn’t hurt at all. I wish the cup was just a cup, Frederic. Do you get it?”

Frederic smiles at her, and she can see how crooked his bottom teeth are. When she first met him, she didn’t want them to be straight. There’s a mischievous glint in his eye when he smiles, as if he’s done something cruel while nobody was there to see it. She used to think that his teeth added to that charm. He says, “Cecile, I’ll get you a damn new cup if you want.” 

Cecile wipes beneath her eyes, black residue from yesterday’s mascara smudging on her fingertips. She says, “It’s not that easy. My father gave me this cup on my birthday last year.”

Frederic grunts and then pinches the chip in the cup. She can’t tell if he’s trying to shatter it because he thinks it’ll be easier to throw away in pieces or if he’s evaluating a way to fix it. She wants to smack his hand, but the latter is possible. She’s seen the good in his heart. When he brings her handpicked flowers or performs his new songs for her before ever singing them on stage. Or when he makes bone broth with a dash of whiskey when she’s sick because that’s what his mother used to do for him when he was a child. Cecile doesn’t know much about his mother—he doesn’t answer her questions about his family either—but she can tell he loves that woman.

Cecile and Frederic first met five months ago. He’d complimented her coat at a bar and then they kissed in the hallway while people were trying to get by. They didn’t move for them. But when he’s gone, she sometimes thinks that she should have gone with the crowd and left him there. But that night they went back to her place after she’d returned from a week of looking after her frail father, and in the morning, when they woke, she was surprisingly comforted to find him there.

Now he takes hold of her ring finger, and she’s thinks she’s stuck with him until one of them dies because he says, “We’ll do it like we’ve said, Cecile. Instead of killing each other, we’ll watch each other grow old. We’ll fight about the TV remote, and we won’t kill each other because we’ll want to kill ourselves instead. But we won’t. We’ll have grey hair and wrinkles and grandchildren that love us more than our children ever have. I’m not going nowhere, woman. Not even when I do.” He puts his mouth to her hand. She’s not crying anymore. The sun continues to rise through the apartment and over those people, pigeons and buildings outside. Cecile knows that all of it, including her father, will one day be reduced to nothing. She moves on top of him and undoes his belt buckle. They have sex on the chair, and as she rides him, she pulls off his shirt and releases it to the floor. He tugs her hair and bites her neck. She’d like to keep him pinned beneath her until the day she dies because she doesn’t want to die alone. But when he finishes inside of her, she knows he has to leave. He fastens his belt and asks if she’s still taking the birth control. She tells him that it makes her nauseous, but she takes one every night. He puts on his shirt and says he has a stash of something that could help with that, but he doesn’t know where it is. Cecile wonders if the stain on his shirt is blood.

“What is that, Frederic?” she says.

 “Oh,” he says, rubbing a finger over the stain. He leans towards her and lays a finger under her chin. “Nothing serious. Your old man is fine.”

Cecile nods at him but he’s already off searching for his jacket. She knows that the jacket is still on the couch. He threw it there when he arrived yesterday. But before they went to sleep, she covered it with a blanket to buy herself another minute or two. While he checks the kitchen, Cecile thinks that the blood on his shirt isn’t hers, but it could be. She wishes she could go back and change her question. Instead, she would have asked if he’d hurt someone. But it’s too late. He moves into the living room, kissing the top of her head as he passes and then notices a sliver of the jacket sleeve poking out from beneath the blanket. He leans over the couch to grab it.

“I don’t play hide-and-seek for long,” he says, shaking out the jacket in front of him. “I know how to hunt something down.”

Before he shoves his arms through the sleeves, she decides that she’s going to ask him.

“Did you hurt someone?” she says. “Tell me the truth.”

He yanks the jacket on, and she can’t see the stain anymore.

“I don’t like you prying, Cecile. Leave me alone.” Then he moves for the door and her stomach lurches. She thinks that if she could just touch him again, then they’d be like they were this morning before the sun. She reaches for him but then pulls her hand back with the other. He doesn’t see that she’d tried to keep him. Before leaving, he pauses in the doorway.

“We’ll conquer everything one day,” he says. “Don’t forget that I’m coming back.”

She stands in her underwear, holding her elbows. She doesn’t say anything.

He raises a finger at her and says, “Don’t start thinking of running off on me now.”

“I’m not,” she says. She tilts her head and smiles. “I’ll be here.”

“Good,” he says. Then he shuts her into the apartment.

The door doesn’t open again. And it won’t until she gets dressed, grabs her keys, and leaves. She’ll walk the streets and carry home groceries. She’ll buy flowers, cut the stems, and arrange them in a vase. She’ll visit her father and hold his hand until he has to be buried. If her mother asks again if she’s seeing anyone, she’ll say no. But there will always be a man on the street with dark hair and a cigarette. She’ll think about running to this man and then she won’t. Instead, she’ll go home and sit on the edge of her bed, thinking about where he is, who he’s hurting. He’ll walk through the door tomorrow or the next day. He might even return this evening. There might be a day that he doesn’t. For now, she stands in the kitchen and thinks that if he ever comes back, she can keep the door locked. Or when he’s not looking, she can pack her life and move. She doesn’t know what she’ll do. For now, she looks down. She brings her hands together and makes the shape of a gun. She points it at the door.

Cerissa DiValentino is a writer from Upstate New York. She holds an MFA in fiction from Boston University, where she received the Helen Deutsch Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Fiction Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, Write or Die, LIT Magazine, and Expat Press. She is working on a novel.

31 July 2025