Murdering Mandy

Murdering Mandy

Written by
Harvina A. Britain



Can you take a life and not kill? Everyone told Mandy that you couldn’t. Were they all wrong? Mandy thought so. Knew they were. She had taken a life as surely as she had pulled a trigger or tied the noose, cut it into tiny little pieces. The life she had taken was her own.


It was on a crisp, fall day in the southern New Mexico desert, in a laid-back little town on the border of another country. People came and went, and everybody knew it, even the Border Patrol. They didn’t go very far, the town was surrounded. Twenty-five miles in any direction and you would be rewarded with a bus ride home.


This was where it had happened, where Mandy had been murdered. A life taken by a choice made in an instant, like a camera flash in the dark. Dead and gone.


She remembered someone saying to her, there were no mistakes, only choices. There is what we do and what we don’t. She made the wrong choice and it had cost her; her life was the price she paid. Dead and gone.


What did you do when you were dead? You went on, Mandy knew that now. Life went on, even yours. Mandy still went to work, saw friends, played ball and traveled. Dead and gone.

Mandy moved around a lot after she died. Once she even moved across the country. To a place she had been a hundred times when she was “alive”. It looked different after she died. Everything had a despairing look to it. Dead and gone.


Winter was Mandy’s favorite season when she was alive. Dead, she hated it. It was a painful reminder of what her life had become in death, cold, gray and unyielding. Snow falling from the heavens like the choices she had made. Dead and gone.


The fall day gave way to the night that she had died. She agreed to meet him where he worked. A fly-by-the-seat of your pants lube shop where she had taken her car at least twenty times. She was married, but separated, so was he. The New Mexico sky was full of stars, it must have held one million. Mandy could see them all. They talked for ten minutes. Did she want to go dancing? No! Mandy just wanted to drown in those coffee colored eyes. Dead and gone.


Mandy went home, he went dancing. The phone woke her up at 2:47, the actual time of death. Would she talk until he got home safe? Yes! Dead and gone.


He came by the next day. They sat out by her pool, telling secrets like little children. He told her he was comfortable with her, felt like he had known her forever. Did she feel it too? Yes! Dead and gone.


Choices. She had been separated for three months; they were trying to work it out. One day after she met him, she quit trying. One month after, she filed for divorce. Dead and gone.


By Christmas they were living together. Mandy was divorced from the man she had been married to for fifteen years. She got the dog and she got sick, very sick. Dead and gone.


Doctor Ezra ran all the tests. Mandy got all the results. They were bad, very bad. “He” and Mandy sat in doctor Ezra’s office, looking like an Amtrak train had hit them. There was no cure…dead and gone.


Mandy changed that day. She wanted her life back, her husband, their home and his love. Her courage and her words failed her. Mandy never made the call that would have changed her life back. In January her ex remarried. Dead and gone.


Nothing was ever the same after that. Mandy rallied at anyone in sight, anyone within earshot. She stayed angry with herself—but took it out on everyone else. Friends fell by the wayside, she quit her job, her beloved dog died and “he” left. Disappeared in the New Mexico night, never to be seen again. Mandy didn’t care, never really had. Dead and gone.


Four years later Mandy found the courage to call, and knew all the words she wanted to say. The phone rang, a woman answered. It was too late…dead and gone.