Animal Control

Fiction by Miles Klee

The following is an excerpt from The Last Year, a longer work of fiction currently in progress. The previous chapter is available here. 

“What do you think of the phrase ‘he took his own life’?” 

I’m asking my most trusted coworker, Alison, the manager who brought me into the company, and with whom I share many weaknesses. She is not directly my boss, although not not my boss, a fact that charges our somewhat flirtatious friendship with a lively dose of risk.  

“Oh, it’s a little fucked up,” she says. “It romanticizes the act.”

We drop the subject as more people collect behind us in line at the coffee shop. It is  something fine to be at that stupid, bland cafe, a chain that ranks below the very successful chain: we value that anonymity. This location is around the block from our office, which in a part of town that none of our friends have ever visited, a short distance from the marina, the sailboats and their silly names.

“Dennis Wilson drowned in the marina,” I say outside, stirring the crushed ice in my cold brew. I never let them give me a lid. “He was swimming off a yacht.”

“So he killed himself.”

“Or took his own life.”

Alison turns to glare at me — it’s sexy as hell — and sips her drink through a paper straw, pinched between forefinger and thumb. I am pushing it on a Monday.

“It’s considered an accident, of course,” I say.

“He may have taken his own life, but how is it our job to figure that out? He made it impossible to know. I’m aware of what the phrase is meant to do. It makes it sound like they were still in control. I have my disagreements with that language.” She steers us left out of the strip mall, away from the office. “Dennis was the one hooked up with Manson.”

“That’s right.”

“I would guess that he killed himself, intentionally or not. Though ‘took his own life’ is better than ‘he died by suicide.’ Isn’t that how it’s written now?”

“Framing it as a disease.”

“Which it is.”