The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Familiar by Sarah Kain Gutowski

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content warning for allusion to suicide

The Value of Pain and Spectacle

For the first time, my ordinary self considers murder.
This is not an ordinary thing to do but she sees
few other options when faced with my extraordinary self’s

repeat invasions, her deliberate transgressions.
After all, she reasons as she makes the children’s lunches,
the best stories teach us: Never leave your enemies

alive. She smears the jam across the bread, cuts
the crusts, our daughter’s sandwich a perfect square.
Poison won’t work, she thinks. It’s too messy,

leaves a trail, she wouldn’t know which to use,
and who has time for research? It has to look
like a choice—like my extraordinary self, swayed

by defeat, breathless with sorrow, wanted to end
it all. What my ordinary self doesn’t realize, of course,
is that my extraordinary self is, by nature, far ahead

in this game. No one likes to be irrelevant, but especially
someone shaped from the clay of possibility. Inside
her squatter’s den by the river, my extraordinary self

has been cataloguing lists of possible ends: exorcism,
immolation, keelhauling, gibbeting, scaphism. It turns out
the more obscure the term, the more elevated or elaborate

its diction, the more brutal the means of death.
My extraordinary self has time for research. She knows,
too, the value of pain and spectacle, the lessons

both can serve, and if she does anything, damnit,
it will be to go out with style. Also, she’ll need some help.
So my ordinary self is surprised one morning when,

after putting the children on the bus and waving
goodbye, she turns to find my extraordinary self
sitting on the stoop, a length of pale rope in her hand.

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