2025 Pushcart Nominated Story from Stanchion Magazine Issue 16
The night Sadie shows up on my doorstep unannounced, there’s a thunderstorm.
My old lady Cavapoo, Cookie, hid under the couch while I binged scary movies playing on one of the cable networks late at night. The kind where you know who the bad guy is. He wears a mask and kills for the sake of killing. There’s never any moral gray area in those kinds of movies. You root for the hero and hope for the demise of the villain. And the hero always wins.
The storm provided the perfect backdrop to my binge. Pop popcorn in my mouth, flash, the killer appears with a bloody knife, bang.
Cookie cowered in fear the whole night. She’s just a big baby.
I adopted her from a shelter when she was about five and I was fresh out of college at 22. Bringing her home was the first adult thing I ever did. Before I even got my first full-time job, I knew I needed someone to rely on me. Something small and helpless on their own to force me to be responsible.
But before Cookie, there was Sadie.
It had been years since I last talked to my childhood best friend. My earliest memory of Sadie was her falling off the monkey bars in first grade, sitting among the wood chips that blanketed our neighborhood playground, crying as she cradled her scraped knee.
“Help?” she whimpered pitifully as I sat down beside her and reassured her that she was okay.
My most recent memory of her was as Maid of Honor at her wedding. She dropped out of college to wed her high school sweetheart, a man old enough to buy beer at her Sweet 16 party.
“He says I don’t need school,” she told me as the makeup artist worked to highlight all the natural beauty she already possessed. “He’s already got a good job fixing AC units. He says he’d rather I stay home and take care of the house and then when we have kids I can be a stay-at-home mom.”
“But you’re barely 20 years old,” I told her. “I thought you wanted to be a teacher.”
She shrugged and closed her eyes so the makeup artist could apply eyeshadow. “I can homeschool the kids.”
It wasn’t a big fight, but she knew I didn’t like Jax. I made that known when he showed up wasted at our senior prom. I hadn’t liked him much before that either, but the older we got, the more he rubbed me the wrong way. But I stood next to her at her wedding regardless. I gave a nice toast and didn’t say a single bad word about the groom. Even though I wanted to.
No, the reason we lost touch was because Jax didn’t like me.
She called me in secret for the first few years. She had my address after I left my childhood home so she could send me Christmas cards. But eventually the calls stopped coming and the cards stopped arriving, and I did my best to imagine her happy, her home full of mini Sadies running around, playing with Barbies, Sadie reading to them and teaching them numbers.
It’s been about eight years since I last saw her, and five since I last heard her voice.
But now she appears on my doorstep, rain drenched and dirty, and I know the life I imagined for her was all wrong.
“Jax is dead,” she says. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Cookie takes a cautious step out from under the couch, her desire to know who the stranger standing at my door is stronger than her fear of the thunder and lightning.
Sadie’s hands shake as she stands in the cold, and when my own shock finally wears off, I usher her in the house. She drips onto the rug as she carefully steps around the coffee table, and drips onto Cookie’s fur as she bends down to pet her. Her hands finally still when my dog starts licking her, and I catch a brief smile pass her lips.
Then I notice the bruise blooming along her jaw. Another one on her shoulder. Her hand shoots up to hide it when she notices me looking.
“Sadie,” I say slowly. “Did you kill Jax?”
She keeps her eyes fixed on Cookie’s, afraid to look at me, but nods.
“Help?”
***
Sadie was always one of the smallest kids on the playground, but she was fearless. The day I watched her fall off the monkey bars and scrape her knee, she cried alligator tears, but then got back up and climbed on again. I watched her from the ground, this tiny little thing with wild strawberry blonde curls and a determined look on her face. The second time, she made it all the way across.
“I did it,” she said happily. Then she took my hand and dragged me with her to the swings. It was like nothing ever happened at all.
In middle school, she was everyone’s friend. Sadie was on the math team and the volleyball team and sang in the school chorus. She ran for eighth grade class President and won in a landslide. She was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in the yearbook.
Everyone loved Sadie. She was nice and pretty and smart, and she always had a smile on her face. That smile was infectious. It was hard not to be happy around her. And I was lucky, because I was her best friend.
I knew her better than all the kids in her clubs and on her teams. I was the one she’d call to gush to about the new boy she had a crush on. I would console her when she didn’t ace a test or she got in a fight with her mom. When her childhood cat died our freshman year of high school, I helped to organize a funeral. I read the eulogy when she was crying too much to read it herself.
We got in trouble together. A lot of trouble. We were partners in crime, and vowed to stay that way forever.
But then she met Jax our junior year, and I feared I was beginning to lose her. She started calling him for everything rather than me. He celebrated her acceptance to her top choice university with her, even though he later asked her to drop out. He consoled her every time she fought with her mom. He bought her a kitten and called him “their first baby.” She stopped having time for me.
I was happy for her at first. I remember her calling me after they met. She was so excited this older guy was giving her the time of day.
“He’s just so cute,” she’d say. “And mature.”
I didn’t agree, but I bit my tongue for her. She was happy. I wanted to see my best friend happy.
When we’d hang out, I felt like the third wheel. Here was a grown man begging Sadie in a baby voice not to leave him even when she had plans with me. Then she’d feel bad for him and ask me if we could hang out in his living room instead, watching war movies that made me queasy. Sadie used a baby voice back on him too. I felt invisible, there in a room with my lifelong best friend.
And then she married him.
And she stopped calling.
So I adopted Cookie and moved on with my life without her.
***
On the floor of my living room, scratching Cookie’s head, Sadie looks like that little girl from the playground. So small and fragile and broken. I know it’s only a matter of time before she picks herself back up again like she always does.
The TV continues to run behind her, another psycho killer in a mask chasing the poor popular blonde girl who you know is also a virgin and who will likely be the only one to survive the movie. And in front of me is my best friend, who killed her husband and didn’t know where else to go.
“What did you do with the body?” I ask her. “How did you kill him? Do we need to get rid of any evidence?”
She looks up at me and smiles, tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes. It’s hard to tell that she’s crying while her hair continues to drip from the rain as well.
“I knew you’d know what to do,” she says, and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I shot him in the head with his own gun. In the kitchen. He came home drunk again, yelling, and I just…”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, and instantly I’m six years old on the playground again. I scoop her up in my arms and let her cry into my chest as I repeat over and over, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Everything’s okay.”
Cookie whimpers, upset that Sadie stopped petting her, and wiggles her way between us into our laps. Sadie laughs through her tears and runs her hand through her fur again.
When she seems to have calmed down and the tears stop coming as frequently, we come up with a plan.
***
I had my suspicions that Sadie and Jax weren’t as happy as they pretended. Sadie became the perfect housewife for him, exactly as he wanted, but every time I heard from her, I could hear the silent desperation in her voice. The forced cheerfulness. She gave up her dreams for him, and I was afraid she was beginning to resent him. Turns out it was even worse than I thought.
The last time she called me, about five years ago, she told me they were trying to get pregnant.
“I’m surprised you don’t have kids already,” I told her. “Jax wants you to be a stay-at-home mom, so I assumed kids would be the first thing you did after getting married.”
“Yeah, well,” she said. “It hasn’t been easy. With Jax losing his job, we’ve been collecting unemployment, and I’m actually going to see a doctor to check and see if I have any fertility issues and…”
“Who are you talking to?” a gruff male voice shouted in the background.
“No one!” Sadie called out, then to me, quieter, “I’m sorry. I gotta go. Love you, bye!”
And that was the last time I heard from her.
I didn’t want to be kept a secret from her husband. She chose him, and I had to be okay with that. I was living my own life, and if she didn’t want to be a part of it, that was fine. Friends grow apart. We have new priorities. We weren’t the same people we were as kids. And there was nothing wrong with that. It’s just the way life works.
I dated here and there, mostly just casual flings. One guy I spent a whirlwind 24 hours with asked about her, the girl I still have pictures with—the awkward glasses and braces phase of middle school—and why we don’t talk anymore. I didn’t know what to tell him, so I just dragged him to my bed instead. Cookie barked and clawed at the closed door the whole time.
***
“Is it a weird time to say that I’ve missed you?” I say as I pull out of my driveway to head to Sadie’s. “That it’s been too long since we’ve caught up?”
“I just killed my husband,” Sadie says, laughing uncomfortably in the passenger seat. “It’s a weird time for anything.”
The rain continues to pound on the windshield as we drive, like it wants to drown out our conversation. If no one can hear us, it never happened. No footprints or tire tracks left in the mud outside my house.
Despite it being five years, it’s almost like no time has passed. Soon we’re talking and laughing and reminiscing as I drive the hour to her house.
Remember the time we stayed out all night wandering through a construction site? Your mom was so worried she tried to file a missing persons report? You took your shoes off and stepped on a nail and had to get a tetanus shot? Remember the time we snuck into that club underage and you tried ecstasy from some guy just handing it out? Remember when we dared each other to see who could steal the most from Walmart without getting caught? Remember when you punched my prom date in the face? I should have punched yours too, and maybe we wouldn’t be here now.
I can feel her loosening up beside me, despite everything. After all this time, she’s still my best friend.
“Jax’s drinking got real bad when we realized we couldn’t have kids,” Sadie says suddenly. Like she needs to get it all out in the open. “He blamed me for it, but I had all the tests done so I’m sure it wasn’t me. He didn’t like that.”
“He was always drunk,” I tell her. “He was drinking at your Sweet 16, he was wasted at prom… He was never nice to you.”
“Yeah, but… it got worse after a while. He’d come home yelling and throwing things, mad at me because dinner wasn’t finished yet, or the laundry wasn’t put away. It was always something, like he was looking for a reason to yell.”
“And he hit you?” I ask.
Sadie’s quiet for a moment, then she nods.
“I got tired of it,” she says quietly. “I did my best to be perfect for him, and it was never enough. So I handled it.”
“You snapped,” I tell her definitively. If anyone asks, she was pushed to this. Battered woman syndrome.
“No,” she says. “I was ready when he got home tonight.”
***
The first thing I notice when we walk in through her kitchen door is the blood.
It’s pooling in all the crevices between tiles, slowly making its way to the door, like the blood in Jax’s brain wants to escape him just as much as Sadie did.
“Let’s soak up as much as we can with paper towels, and then we’ll clean the tiles with hydrogen peroxide, and mop. Throw everything in garbage bags when we’re done.”
“What about Jax?” Sadie asks.
I’m trying hard not to look at him. But there he is, still the focal point of the room just like he was when he was alive.
I’ve never seen a dead body in person before. It’s not like in the movies. Jax lies on his back, limbs bent at awkward angles from his fall, and stares at the ceiling unblinking. I can almost see the hate still lingering in his eyes. There’s a perfect dark hole in the center of his forehead.
“You’ve got good aim, Sades.”
“But what do we do with the body?” she asks again.
I see lightning flash through the window just before a crash of thunder. The storm’s closer here than it was at my house.
“Go get an old blanket.”
***
We wrap Jax’s unmoving body in a blanket and carry him out to the trunk of my car. Between the thick trees, pouring rain, and well-past-midnight darkness, we don’t worry that any of her neighbors can see us. I carry Jax around his shoulders while Sadie holds his legs, and we try to stifle our laughter when we almost drop him in the mud.
Sadie brings out a bucket and mop while I’m on my hands and knees in her kitchen, working hydrogen peroxide into all the cracks and crevices in the floor. A garbage bag sits nearby, filled with as much blood as we could soak up. We went through half a roll of paper towels. I don’t understand how a man could have so much blood just in his head. It seems like we’ll never get it all.
We work in silence for a while, me scrubbing and Sadie mopping, but every once in a while, she laughs uncomfortably. The awkward kind of laughter when you know it’s not funny, but it’s either laugh or cry at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Sadie’s always been a laugher, and because of her, I am too.
“I can’t believe I killed my husband.”
“I can’t believe you killed your husband! And I’m helping you clean!”
Eventually, her floors shine more than they probably ever had, and we tuck all the sponges and mop heads in the trash bag and seal it up. It goes into the trunk on top of Jax’s lifeless body.
We drive back toward my house, in the town we grew up in, holding hands in the center console. I can hear Sadie sniffling, still trying to disguise her tears, and I know I’ll never truly understand what led her to do what she did.
But it’s my job to stand beside her anyway. It always has been.
I park under a tree at the edge of the playground we met in as kids. It’s all overgrown with weeds now, the monkey bars rusted and the swings coated in dirt. I wonder where kids go now, or if they’re all just glued to screens like our parents were once so afraid of.
Sadie isn’t talking, but seems to understand. In the backseat are shovels we took from her garage. She gathers them in one arm and the trash bag of bloody cleaning supplies in the other and steps through the trees into the woods.
I’m left to carry Jax by myself. Less carrying and more dragging, as he’s almost twice my size. I wrap my arms around his torso and pull, walking backwards, his legs leaving tracks in the dirt. It’s better than taking two trips. I follow Sadie as she walks and walks and walks and if it weren’t for the trail Jax leaves behind, I’d worry if we’d be able to find the playground and my car again when we’re done.
The TV is still on when we get back to my house. Covered in blood and dirt and rainwater, we look like the villain onscreen. Cookie stands guard as I step through the door, yipping and barking and pretending to be brave until she realizes it’s just me. I want to scoop her up in my arms, but I want a shower more.
***
I give Sadie a pair of clean pajamas to borrow. They’re too big on her, the shirt seeming to swallow her up whole, but she’s warm and clean and dry for the first time all night. She leans into me on the couch and I rub her back, flipping through the channels until I land on cartoons.
“What do we do now?” she asks quietly.
“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly.
“What if someone comes looking for me?”
“I don’t know,” I say again.
“You’ll stay with me?”
“I never left.”
Lindsay N Marshall is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at Arcadia University in Philadelphia. She's had short stories published in the online literary journals Feminine Collective, Idle Ink, and her latest short story received third place in Onyx Publications’ Spring contest and will be published in Etched Onyx Magazine and the Story Discovery Podcast. She currently lives in New Jersey just outside New York, and by day, works with autistic preschoolers. She can be found at @lindsaynmwrites on Twitter and Instagram.
Read more 2025 Pushcart Prize-nominated stories, including Black Balloon by Abigail E. Myers, Come Wednesday by David Lanvert, and Scattered Ghosts by Abigail Kemske.
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