Cry Me a River

by Christopher P. Mooney

I heard him before I saw him.

          “Rachel, is that you?”

          Turning round on instinct, I came face-to-face with the man I’d shared three years and a front door with.

          He smiled that smile as his recognition was confirmed.

          “Hello, Simon,” I said.

          He hadn’t changed much during the ten months since we’d last seen each other. The same handsome features, cropped hair, and bullish neck on broad shoulders that he liked to have massaged. The same impossibly-blue eyes.

          Almost exactly the same person who’d eventually admitted to fucking my late sister in our bed while I was out at work.

          We exchanged the usual pleasantries and I found myself arranging to meet him for a drink the following evening at a bar we both knew from back in the day.

I made sure to get there before him and ordered the first of several rounds of drinks: bottled beer for him and what he wrongly assumed was rum-coke for me. He could still put them away faster than anybody else I’d ever met and this time I didn’t complain.

          “Let’s go for a walk along the quay,” I suggested after a couple of hours, “just like old times.”

          He readily agreed, as I’d known he would.

          His legs soon disobeyed his intentions and began giving way beneath him.

          All it took was one gentle, well-timed push and he was soon struggling without success against the cold and the current, his drugged limbs too weak to save themselves.

          I threw the empty bottle in after him without looking back.

          May they rot in hell, I thought, as I walked into a different bar to celebrate with a proper drink.

Christopher P. Mooney was born and brought up in Glasgow, Scotland. At various times in his life, he has been a supermarket cashier, a shelf stacker, a barman, a cinema usher, a carpet-fitter’s laborer, a foreign-language assistant, and a high school teacher. He would rather be a writer. He lives near London, where he spends a lot of time at his desk; reading, writing and alternating between hot coffee, cold beer, and red wine. He recently had one of his stories, “Fresh Fish,” published in the inaugural edition of Crooked Holster.