I picked a serial killer on national TV because I wanted attention. There’s no cleaner way to say it. Most people prefer the version where I was naive and impressionable.
Young or tricked by shady game show shenanigans, but the truth is smaller and worse. I just wanted 300 strangers to look directly at me and agree that I was real. Love really had nothing to do with it. Applause did.
They put 3 guys behind a partition and had me ask them questions like I was interviewing husbands at the mall. One sounded like he was auditioning to be a chad. One sounded boring. And one actually sounded like a finished thought. He didn’t fumble or lean into the mic like he was begging for laughs.
He was just steady with a practiced stillness.
To a girl who felt like some sort of amalgamation of blur and bad luck, that kind of stillness sounds a lot like a rescue. It’s kinda like when you mistake a dead end for a destination just because it’s quiet. I picked the quiet and the studio audience screamed like I’d just solved dating in general.
For one brief minute, I believed I had done something correct with my life.
I didn’t know his name yet. I only knew the feeling of choosing him.
It was the first time that feeling stayed.
A few years later they called him a serial killer, which felt less surprising than it should’ve.
The clip of me choosing him reappeared on the news next to photographs of women I had never seen. My face was still smiling. Nothing in the image had learned anything.
I watched until the smile stopped meaning a person. I kept watching anyway. I don’t know why.
Then something struck me. If that image of me was going to last forever, I wanted that moment before it to last too.
I bought a stamp at the post office before I wrote the letter. I never bought a stamp before then. Never needed one. Felt both official and slightly overpriced. America at its finest. The address to his prison was shorter than I expected. The envelope looked almost empty when I dropped it into the mailbox.
Strange for something that had weighed on me for so long.
He wrote back on paper thin enough to see light through. It’s a prison thing. No apologies. No poetry. Just the weather. The food. The way the sun settled on the floor outside his cell. Ordinary little details, arranged carefully, like he had all the time in the world to notice them because…he did.
I replied immediately with things that didn’t matter to anyone else. The way I lined up my medicine in the cabinet above my sink. The neighbor’s cat. The sinking feeling I have when my car tries and fails to start every morning. Small bits of reality to show him that the world was still happening.
Visiting him in person felt like the only natural thing to do next.
The room is arranged to prevent touch, which caused my chest to deflate with relief. I’ve always found touch to be a weird kind of interference. Here there was only the stale air between us and the steady hum of the Pepsi vending machine that never seemed to run out of breath. Just buzzzzzzz and whirring for days.
When he’s escorted in by the guards, he smiles the same way he did on the show, when there was a number attached to his name that didn’t come before a body count. I feel the same small, embarrassing feeling I had that day. I think of the questions I asked and the way he answered. I considered asking him the questions again but for some reason didn’t. Instead I soaked in the awkward calmness that sat between us. For an hour, I didn’t have to guess if I was being boring. You can’t bore a man who has nowhere to go.
He doesn’t ask why I keep coming back. He already knows. We talk about circadian rhythms. The way time moves differently indoors. He told me he dreamed about a door that wouldn’t lock. I didn’t know how to answer because a door that won’t lock is a tragedy I don’t think anyone can explain.
The hour ends when the guard says so. The clock is perpetually stuck at 10 and 2 and my Apple Watch was taken when I was searched. Another prison thing.
He stands first.
The guard helps him up. He walks through a door that closes with a soft, practiced click that sounds like ASMR.
I sit in my black Toyota Matrix and check the rearview mirror, even though there’s nothing there. There never is. I’m looking for that smiling girl from the show, but she’s gone. Now there’s only this woman who keeps a calendar on her phone that she doesn’t fully remember marking.
People want a lesson when they hear stories like this. They need regret arranged into something useful. They want fear. A moral that was learned. I have none of those in any proportion that a person would find satisfying.
Every month I drive my Toyota Matrix to a cage to visit the only thing that has ever made me feel permanent.
The only difference between us is that he was caught.
I chose him.
I keep choosing him.
The audience keeps cheering like this solved everything and my face never stops smiling.
Mallory Smart is a Chicago-based writer, author of The Only Living Girl in Chicago and I Keep My Visions to Myself. New work is forthcoming. She is also the founder of Maudlin House and host of the podcast Textual Healing.
Dodo Eraser 
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