’ve killed my uncle four times now, and he simply refuses to die. To be clear: I haven’t tried to kill him. I’ve clocked and shot and stabbed him dead, dead, dead. The first time, he’d convinced me to waddle out with him on the pond behind his cabin in his rickety dinghy, and when he stood to cast his line I plucked up one of the heavy oars and smashed him on the back of the head. He toppled into the water, his heavy Carhartt boots sucking him under. I sat staring at the water for at least fifteen minutes. He didn’t surface, but the next morning I could hear him whistling in the bathroom, whittling at his ears with a Q-tip.

             He and my aunt took me in after my parents were killed in a car accident. I’d been off at summer camp, where instead of learning about building fires or playing capture the flag I was busy kissing the other boys in my cabin and having my first sexual encounters with one of the counselors, a burly eighteen-year-old named Jake whose skin was so tan I expected it to flake off like I was eating fried chicken when I touched his hairy legs. He snuck me out after the rest of our lodge was snoring, wet breath coming in and out like dogs panting. We would sidle into a small clearing in the woods next to a moss-covered well, and he would caress my chin with his meaty fingers and stare at me until I demanded he take his pants off. When I was taken away after news of my parents’ death came trickling through the forestry, he cried and watched the car pull away.

 

The second time I tried to kill him, my uncle had just shown me how to load his twelve-gauge. He left me in the living room to insert the shells, and when he came back from the kitchen with a bottle of beer, I fired at his chest. His sternum exploded, guts and heart and blood splattered against the wall. My aunt was out working at the pharmacy in town, but by the time she came home, my uncle was doing jumping jacks while he fried sausages for dinner.

             I preferred my aunt, who was the more attractive of the two even though she was eight years older. All blonde and milk skin, she kept her body toned by following along with workout videos on YouTube and slinging around a pair of orange six-pound neoprene dumbbells. She took handfuls of vitamins, fish oils, biotin, and milk thistle every morning and drank sixty ounces of water a day. Her skin glowed and was wrinkle-free, unlike my uncle’s, which was starfished by acne scars across his cheeks. His face reminded me of a cobbled road. When I imagined them having sex, picturing his mottled, scarred body clashing with the silk screen of hers, I got dizzy.

             Their cabin was small, four crammed rooms arranged in a box: the living room and kitchen and two bedrooms. Mine was the size of a janitorial closet, my twin-size mattress scrabbling at the door like a sick, sad cat. We had no interior bathroom, just an outhouse and manual shower ten yards into the woods; walking out to shit in the morning my calves would get scratched by nettles, and one time I got hookworm from padding through the dirt barefoot. My aunt sobbed over the scabby lesions on my feet, hauling me into a doctor’s office where I stared at the illustrations of the nervous and cardiovascular systems, veins and arteries trickling around yellow bones like a blue and red race track. The doctor, a creaky old thing, prescribed me a series of anthelmintic drugs that turned my urine green. My aunt screamed at my uncle to install a chemical toilet or she’d withhold sex. I heard them bumping and grinding later that night while I stared at the ceiling and masturbated.

 

The third time, my uncle was chopping wood. While he took a break, I buried the axe in his skull. I was too skinny to really give him a solid whack, so I had to let gravity do the trick. I grunted and heaved, managed to pull the axehead from the stump where my uncle had gnarled it, and it took everything I had to sway it over my head. I nearly fell over, shoulders reeking with pain, but managed to stumble up behind him where he sat on a fallen log, whistling a rock song and snapping his fingers while he took a rest. I thrust the axe downward through his shag of hair. I heard him grunt and fall. Three hours later, he was taking my aunt into town to buy perennials at the lawn care store.

             They were good enough people. When my parents were alive, my aunt and uncle drove three hours every Thanksgiving to see us, bringing along a homemade pecan pie and a bourbon caramel ice cream that my parents let me eat even though the booze was never cooked out. It tasted like campfire, and I would down my scoops in quick, huge bites, my aunt looking on with prideful glee.

             My mother and father were rich, and our house was way too big for us, five bedrooms that echoed with ticking silence. Our living room was full of expensive vases and white sofas. I was never allowed any pets, and when friends came over they had to take off their shoes before they could stare wide-eyed at our humongous television and vaulted ceilings. My parents sent me to public school because we lived in a great district, but most of the kids were lower middle class and were bewildered by my expensive pants. Girls asked if I would date them so I would buy them shoes, but I laughed at them and flipped them off between classes.

 

It wasn’t out of hate that I killed my uncle the fourth time, or any of them, for that matter. I sprinkled rat poison from a box I found in one of the cabinets next to the sink, dribbling the powder on his Caesar salad, mixing it in with the parmesan and anchovy-flecked dressing. His nose started gushing blood during dessert, and he doubled over in pain, clutching at his stomach and moaning like a bad actor. He stumbled to the outhouse and planted himself there, where I imagine he writhed and groaned, body popping with death. I didn’t actually see him die, but I heard his raucous rattling stop. In the morning he was doing pushups in the living room between the couch and table.

             I envied him his fitness. Though I wasn’t fat or skinny, I wasn’t particularly muscular, my arms and legs planar and flat. Because I didn’t eat much after my parents died, my stomach was a smooth blank slope, but I didn’t have the kind of abs that Jake had possessed, which had been my favorite feature. I’d traced my finger along the squares of his muscles and listened to him shudder. He would try to hide his excitement by laughing, but that only made his arousal more obvious. I’d enjoyed teasing him, making it a game to see if I could make him come without ever settling my hand on his crotch. His eyes were always glossy in the moonlight.

             My uncle sang and twanged on a banjo some nights, when he and my aunt dragged me out behind the cabin, slashes of moonlight twinkling in long rectangles against the ripples of the fish pond. They would build a bonfire whose smoky texture left grainy discomfort in my eyes for days, the hefty wooded smell following my clothes and digging into my hair. He would croon, his singing voice an octave higher than his regular tenor. His lips would curl into a tight sphinctral loop, and when he leaned his head back the cords of his neck were bathed in the silver of the moon. I watched my aunt, who banged her hands on a log like it was drum, her eyes fastened on him, glistening with teary love. It made my head hurt, and I had to stop it.

             But I know now that I can’t. After that fourth try, I gave up. I’m nearly eighteen, and I’ve dropped loads of hints that I want to go off to college somewhere, someplace unexpected like Boseman, Montana, or Bennington, Vermont. I have no idea if there are real colleges there, or if they’d be hard to get into. I do fine in school when I do show up, but the drive into town is an hour, and I am not a morning person. My aunt drops me off in front of the school on the mornings she has to fill prescriptions for birth control and rheumatism, but sometimes I just don’t feel like handling the weight of math textbooks, or the sour smell of the chemistry lab, or the rancid bathrooms where instead of scrubbing the urinals the janitors probably shoot up heroin. I’ve told my aunt and uncle that I’ll pay for school if I get in somewhere; the upshot of my parents’ demise was a hearty life insurance payout, even though I won’t have access to the cash until three months from now, when my birthday hits like a jackpot on a slot machine. I’m counting down the days on a sheet of paper tacked up above my squashy bed. When my aunt, dropping off dried sheets she launders by hand rather than driving to the town’s one Laundromat that smells like chewed gum and dirty feet, pointed to it and asked what I was doing, I said I was tracking the days until Christmas, hoping she wouldn’t do the math and discover I must have thought Santa came by in May. She shrugged, asked me to help her with the fitted sheet, and then marched off to her next stop, the kitchen, where she would loop towels in the mouths of the cutlery and gadget drawers.

 

I dream of other ways to off my uncle: decapitation sounds the most permanent, but I’m not opposed to running him over with his truck, choking him to death (though that’s a lot of body contact), or even letting loose a swarm of brown recluses or black widows, if I could find a way to hoard them and teach them to do my bidding. Anything to cut him down to size, skim off the prickling zest that seems to follow him every which way like a hazy cloud of gnats. Even when he sweats he smells like a crispy mountaintop. He’s so tiring.

             But I’ve accepted that these are just dreams, like me owning a Lamborghini or ever going on a date. The boys and girls at my school are too absurd and immature, tainted with body odor and pipe dreams. The jocks are too stupid, the nerds too smart. I miss Jake sometimes, but that’s because we didn’t really have to talk or know one another. Kids today want the whole package. Talk about selfish.

             So I’ll wait until I can run away, find someone stupid-smart or smart-stupid somewhere far away, and cross my fingers that my uncle kicks the bucket on his own. If history means anything, it’s the only shot I have.