The sickly illumination of the street lights poured like urine through the windows of the apartment, washing over the fetid burnt-orange couch, the pile of ant-covered plates near the wall, and the broken armchair abandoned in the corner. Jake stood in the hall. He had closed the door silently, even with the scurry of the rats and the intermittent screaming of the other tenants he had to be sure that he would not be heard. The carpet squished underneath his shoes as he walked towards the main room. He found his way in the shadow around the piles of pizza boxes and magazines without even a flashlight. Was she on the couch? Slowly approaching, he gripped the blade in his pocket. A Dalí print on the opposite wall seemed to taunt him. He tried to forget how happy she’d been that Christmas. But no. That was before. She was a different person now. He unzipped his jacket pocket and slid the out the knife. A passing car illuminated the room for a moment. Without wasting an instant he jabbed, hitting cardboard and something squishy. A putrid smell hit his nostrils. Rotten Chinese food.
There were bugs on his hands. Why did she have to do this to him? He pushed himself off the sticky carpet and grabbed his knife out of the rotten food, sending a pile of plates on the couch crashing to the floor. He froze, looking towards the half-open bedroom door. It was cloaked in suffocating shadow.

A light clicked on. Shit.

“Hello?”

He gripped the knife, imagining the billions of scenarios that could transpire. He selected one.

“Jeff?”

He knew she couldn’t see him. He looked around. The piles of garbage seemed so far away, so alien. They’d fucked on that now-disgusting couch. He’d thrown that vase that was now a pile of shards at her. Looking towards the door again, he noticed a tube of toothpaste on the ground. He’d probably used that too.

She fucking knew that she had it. She knew the whole time. In a year or three he’d be a corpse. But she’d be one now. He always had wondered how her skin could be so pale. Gritting his teeth, he darted forward. It wasn’t really difficult at all. The first few jabs only went skin deep, but looking in her eyes made it easier.

“Liar,” they seemed to say, “I’m a liar. I deserve this to last much much longer.” It was like it was taking hours for it all to happen; he could see the bloody knife traveling down slowly, like a plane flying high in the stratosphere, far away and silent. There were some shards of glass on the opposite side of the room. Studying them, they were the tank the goldfish he’d gotten her at the fair last year. The room was almost square, but there was a leak in one of the pipes and the walls were encrusted with specks of mold. Her pipe was at the edge of at the antique dresser that he’d bought her at the flea market two years ago. The only other thing on the dresser was something in a frame—it was the picture she’d taken of him at the beach. She was so pale in that photo, even though they stayed at the shore for a week. What a fucking idiot. He should have known. The bloody airplane in his hand made ten or twenty stops. Her hands and feet moved slowly through the air. He held her hands away from the area he was working on. The blood was flowing down the oily bed in little rivulets, mixing with the moldy carpet on the ground. She wasn’t moving now. The lurid light of the lamp on the floor beside the bed seemed to scream that something was wrong. The blood all over his face had the virus. All his blood had the virus. At that moment it seemed all too clear. He snapped back, dropping the knife in the pool of blood and organs that was her abdomen. The virus was all over him. The virus was inside of him. He was as dead as the corpse in front of him. He let go of her hands, letting them fall limply at her sides. The patches of mold on the wall seemed alive, to dance and dance like they were alive in his body, killing him day by day. Invading, conquering. He didn’t want to go like her, cordoned off in her apartment to slowly die. He grabbed the knife out of her abdomen and dug a long, deep cut his right arm. Their blood mixed on his arm, but hers was already beginning to clot. He looked at the wall. The mold was dancing slower. They couldn’t infect him now, they were dead and he was free. Slicing away at the left wrist, he looked back towards the wall. Dark pools were forming on the ground near his hands as the warm liquid escaped. He fell on the floor, no longer able to move. He could see out the door to the windows in the living room. The sun was reaching its first rays into the morning sky. The night was almost over.