'Shit!' she cried as the yolk broke and began seeping into the albumen, the cigarette-burn of its orange fading to insipid yellow as the oil bubbled around it. The phone rang.
'Are you still cooped up in that place like an anchoress?' He chuckled. (Jack Common, the author of The Ampersand and, more famously, Kiddar's Luck, had once lived in the house she was alone in now) 'Come on out to the old place. I've acquired the most amazing heifer. We can pasteurise its milk together.'
As she drove she remembered the billboards in lockdown, stripped of adverts, looking like rough, pitted abstract canvases.
He had grown the sort of dangling goatee she had always associated with the wrestler Jim 'The Anvil' Neidhart. 'Do you remember how Mr G tried to teach us the concept of a war of attrition?' He asked. 'Standing on top of our desks playing wink-murder? Probably get fired for that now.'
She remembered, as a child, rubbing her fingers down the ridges in a plaster cast of a fossilised ammonite. The feeling of touching something utterly alien, remote from her in consciousness and time.
'I just don't understand. You move where the action is, then sit alone in a tatty old flat reading. You could do that here.'
'I couldn't,' she said quietly. 'I really couldn't.'
'I'm thinking of investing in artificial intelligence,' he told her. 'It's the future apparently. Old Durham chum's got a startup. Very clever little machine apparently. Works out which words to use based on amplitude, or something. Instant Shakespeare, as easy as that!' She did not point out that he meant to say frequency. 'It'd give your Phil an aneurysm really. You know, maybe it's...I mean...in a way...well...' he trailed off.
'AI. Of course.' She laughed. 'Hard work really is anathema to you, Bunny.'
'I resent this characterisation of me as one of the idle rich. The fact is I worked for every acre of this land.' He smirked at her over the lip of his hipflask. 'It was an absolutely punishing climb out of that womb, you know.'
It was then that he came in close, as he had once before. He never saw what she was holding in the arm that dangled by her side. Her abdominal muscles tensed. He looked at her like an ant tasting alcohol. As his breaths became moist sucking sounds he continued to look in her eyes with almost embarrassed incomprehension, as if he were apologising for dropping a messy dessert on a good linen tablecloth.
Once, a smug little rapist had tried to pull her up on her incorrect use of the singular form of alumni. She tied him spreadeagle on a wooden classroom chair and smashed both his testicles into mush with a 20oz hammer.
As he sank to the ground she forced herself to breathe slowly. Antimony, she mouthed. Bismuth. Chromium. Deuterium. When she finished sounding out the final consonant of zinc she looked left and right, raised the knife to her lips, and licked it.
After removing his clothes for burning she looked down at Bunny's already-discolouring flesh and was struck by the similarity of the scene to the rightmost panel of Bacon's Sweeney Agonistes triptych. Looking up, she saw that the cow, Bunny's heifer, had been watching for some time, chewing cud with the indifference of an angel. As it turned away she lit a cigarette and smoked it, never taking her eyes off the cow as it receded in the distance. The ash formed first into a long, uneven cone, then fell, sifting away from itself, into the whiskey-wet grass.
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