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She laughed. Perhaps it was only polite, considering his costume: camouflage soldier gear with helmet and boots. He’d picked them up at an army surplus store a few hours before the party that he had suddenly decided to attend.

He hoped the nurse’s laugh was an indication of deeper interest in him. She glided off with her perfect posture and noiseless, cushioned step. He watched her.

The nurse seemed to be everywhere. She had a word or touch for everyone at the party, though Seth thought she paid special attention to the men. He was forced to watch her play her role flawlessly, offering up the pills like a dutiful nurse, even tilting the glasses that held the liquid they used to wash down the pills.

It was strange that he would feel jealous over the pantomime she played with the other guests. Not like his usual self, especially considering she was a stranger to him. But then, he usually didn’t have something so picturesque to look at. Or to fear losing to the attractions of another partygoer.

He soothed his anxiety by noting that her movements were professional and precise. She was merely acting with them. With him, she had lingered. She had laughed.

A hooded Reaper bumped into him roughly and almost sent both men to the ground. Seth was jarred out of his reverie. The Reaper patted him on the back and moved on.

“Hey!” said Seth, but the man was long gone. He smoothed down his uniform jacket and scratched at an itch he couldn’t quite reach between his shoulder blades. The nurse had moved toward the keg room, so Seth followed her.

A couple entered the room together, dressed as an X-rated version of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. They gulped down the jello shots someone was handing around and exclaimed when they saw the nurse. Like moths, they flew toward her light. Little Red bent over in her tiny skirt to show the nurse where she could put her syringe, while the wolf claimed to need medical attention in a region below his waist.

Seth watched closely as the nurse avoided their more forward advances and placed pills on their tongues. Little Red rolled the pill around on her tongue suggestively before swallowing it. She and the wolf started to laugh but seemed to change their minds. As quickly as they had entered, they left the room, without another glance at the nurse.

When the time was right, he approached her again. “Still on duty, Nurse? Or do you have time for a private consultation?”

The old Seth would have cringed after delivering a line like that. Tonight, Seth felt radiant, as if nothing could go wrong. Everything in his life had pointed him to this night, this moment, this string of words. This figure in white.

The nurse nodded and took the arm he offered her. They walked past the crush of people at the kitchen’s edge and out the back door. In the back yard, there were fewer people; the noise of the music was muted. Away from the distractions inside the house, Seth noticed that she smelled like lilies of the valley. No, not as sweet as lilies of the valley—tart. It was a combination of scents he had never smelled before but now realized was the perfect blend. It smelled so very clean.

“Seth,” she said. “Look at me.”

He wondered how she knew his name. Had he told her earlier? He couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter.

“Seth,” she said again. Her eyes glowed and spun in the tricksome light, and Seth bathed himself in their depths. A wave of sensation swept over his entire body in a flash. It left him shuddering. The sound of her voice echoed in his head until he laughed out loud. The pure relief and delight of releasing his laughter made him want to collapse on the ground.

But he wouldn’t do that. He had her to himself, in a dark corner of the yard. She was looking only at him. He wouldn’t waste this opportunity to capture her interest. To possess her, or whatever it was in her that brought out this idiotic, excruciating, ecstatic response. His feelings had nothing to do with sex...except that they were so violently lustful. He wanted something from her, and wanted it with a desperation that left him breathless.

Seth probed her eyes, looking for an answer, but it wasn’t there anymore. She looked back at him with a serene expression. She was like a crocus, a duck’s back, a bowl of cream. An aspirin.

Because he could think of nothing else to satisfy his craving for her, he began to kiss her. Their tongues met and then pushed beyond each other. He felt as if he were inside her mouth, at the back of her throat. He wanted to shelter there. Their teeth clacked like the keys of a typewriter.

Seth opened his eyes again. The crescent moon shone bright. For a moment, he thought it reflected not the light of the sun on the other side of the planet, but the luminous face of the nurse he was kissing.

A splash of yellow caught his eye. In the corner of her pocket, the syringe. Seth wondered why she had dispensed her medication to everyone except him. He had watched the other guests take her pills. None of them was paying the slightest bit of attention to her anymore, even though she gleamed like a pearl in the moonlight.

Seth bit down hard on her tongue. She drew back and looked at him without judgment. She did not feel anything for him, even when he hurt her.

“Seth,” she said. The voice sent tremors of realization through him.

When he hurt her. He could hurt her and he could have her. That was the way to keep her attention. He grabbed the syringe out of her pocket and plunged it into her thigh. The nurse collapsed on the ground.

Now he looked down at her body, at the way the dress bunched between her legs, and he felt peace.

“You want to come home with me,” he told her prone form.

He picked her up by bending one knee on the ground, pulling her shoulders and arms over his back, and moving toward the center of her torso as he got into a standing position. She was a tall woman and he had always heard that dead (and unconscious?) bodies became heavier, but he found that he could carry her easily. He walked back through the party.

Nobody looked their way. The feeling that there was no one in the world but the two of them grew stronger. His actions seemed predestined. He only had to follow along as Another’s plan unfolded.

Seth put the nurse in his car, sprawled across the back seat. He drove. At some point, the nurse sat up. Seth’s heart stopped for a long moment.

“Seth,” she said. In the rearview mirror, he looked at her face. Her eyes were so much larger than expected. His heartbeat settled into a comfortable rate as he looked into them.

In his name, he heard her need. She cared, after all. He knew what she needed him to do. It emanated from her. Images flowed through his mind, a calming stream of pictures that explained everything. He was being asked to help her perform a sacred duty, an honor beyond anything his kind could understand. All Seth could do was wonder why she had chosen him out of all humankind to help her propagate in this uncharted land. He would play a new kind of father to her Madonna.

She gave directions and Seth drove where she needed him to go. They parked in a field next to a burned-out house. Seth followed the nurse as she walked through the charred front door. The outer walls of the building still stood, but the roof and all of the interior structure had collapsed. In the middle of the house was a giant silver tube, capped at both ends. The nurse pressed on a fault line running around one end. It rolled aside. The nurse beckoned Seth to follow her.

Seth walked into the tube and down a hallway ringed with light panels until the nurse paused. The outline of a door appeared in front of her. She directed him inside. The only light in the room after she shut the door came through its little square window. The nurse kissed him gently on the lips. There was something wrong.

Seth tried to block the thought. The nurse was with him. The nurse loved him. Other troubling thoughts broke through. What was she going to do to him? How could he have followed her without question? More images shot through his mind, jagged and cutting this time. The medicine in the syringe, flowing into her bloodstream, preparing her body for an unnatural coupling. White pills that she had fed to every single other person at the party except for Seth. Her eyes. Glowing, transmitting, instructing. Earlier, the fiery landing of the tube inside the house that was now a burned hulk. The nurse walking out of the inferno, heading at an incredible speed toward the person whose composition made him most fitting to bear her young. But not perfectly fitting. No, she would have to make modifications.

She giggled, and something broke. A pane of glass shattered inside Seth. His body moved in slow motion toward the floor. The nurse caught him and lowered him expertly onto the table in the center of the room. A steel-rimmed circle of light blinked on over his face. Seth thought he saw his nurse glow in unison with it.

“You want to come home with me.” Her laugh was fluting, silver-white. It hung in the air above him. “I made sure of that.”

Half a mile away, a man took binoculars away from his face and put them into his right-side jacket pocket. He had to pull open his hooded robe to reach the clothing underneath. A white mask tumbled out of his pocket as he tried to push the binoculars deeper in. He grabbed a device from the other pocket and watched for a moment while a red light blinked in the center of its screen. With his thumb, he pressed a button in the keypad. A blank screen appeared. He typed: The unicorn took the poison. We have infiltration.

-inspired by A Perfect Circle’s performance of “The Nurse Who Loved Me“

The End