helena troy kills people

by Holly Baldwin

Everything about the arcade was sticky.

Helena tried to stand straight, not touching anything. It had been hours now of Hector bent over one of the machines, Tommy bent over another, both breathing heavily as if running and letting out little grunts in time with the mechanical doot doots.

She wished she had a car. Or that Joanna did. Perhaps that wouldn’t matter, though. The other girl didn’t seem particularly interested in helping her get home and get what she needed, but instead was leaning (probably stickily) against Tommy, going “Yeah, get him! Oof, yeah, go!”

Helena stared at her. Sucked her teeth. Touched Hector’s shoulder and tried to get into the game as well.

It seemed stupid.

“This seems stupid,” she said.

Hector glared up at her boobs for a second before turning back to the machine. “Go away then,” he said.

“Don’t be rude,” Joanna said. It was unclear who she was talking to.

Either way, Helena was out. She shoved off him slightly in her launch towards the exit. His concentration lapsed, he lost something in that game, and he swore. It didn’t seem to be at her, though. In fact, no attention of any kind seemed directed at Helena as she marched scowling from the dark arcade and out onto the even darker boardwalk.

It had rained while they’d been inside. The swampy air’d been churned salty and clear. It was September now, and the tourists had long since returned home, so the boardwalk was empty. The emptiness — especially at night — always seemed to amplify every detail, making the whole shitshow ethereal. The boardwalk itself felt dry, somehow. It must be; all that salt. Yet even through her sparkly flip-flops, the wood seemed to suck all the moisture from the pads of her feet.

The sea was a hushed roar, a dark tide swollen all the way up beneath those dry boards.

Helena lit a cigarette and finally took a nice, deep breath.

“Hey. You mind if I bum one?”

She turned, scowl already in place. It was Joanna. The other girl grinned toothily. Helena handed over her second-to-last cig, which was quickly clamped in peeling lips and lit.

“Oof, thanks,” Joana sighed out a plume of smoke. The lights of the arcade caught themselves in that smoke, rays of neon cast through spookily like something from the X-Files. “Was getting kinda stank in there, wasn’t it?”

“Hm,” Helena said, glaring out at that black sea. Still angry, somehow. Possibly about Joanna not having a car, and why was that any kind of fair? It wasn’t like Helena had a car. No, it had to be something else.

Either way, Helena didn’t rise any kind of voice up to meet the other woman’s clear offering of conversation.

Joanna did not seem to mind this, or take the heavy handed hint at all. “I swear, I dunno why they even ask us along. It’s not like they’re hanging off us if we play.”

Helena pursed her lips. Tasted the words for a moment, considered not saying them, but then did say, “I never even ever tried to play.”

Joanna laughed. “I have. Tommy sometimes meets his dealer here; they both get into this dumb kid shit. I started playing before either of em once when they were moving slow; same game he always plays, you know? Fucking wild; their whole conversation halted. After a minute Tommy kinda awkwardly was like, ‘lets check this out,’ and started up another paired game with his dude across the whole arcade. I won my game and made my way over there and he was like, ‘yo Jo, come check this out. Yeah, stand right there, baby. You’re my good luck charm, ba-aby,’” Joanna was making her voice low and rough, a caricature of her man, and Helena couldn’t help it; she cackled. The accuracy was honestly too much.

Joanna grinned again. Her grin maybe wasn’t so annoying. Not as annoying as her not having a car was, at any rate. Helena smirked back before rolling her eyes up, up and away, back to the arcade where both boys were still were dooting and deeting and huffing inside.

“Just once I’d like him to be my good luck charm, you know? That too much for a girl to ask?” Joanna said, and Helena stiffened.

“Sure is,” she mumbled, and they both went quiet.

Silence, except for all that crushing ocean under them.

After a moment Joanna let out a big sigh, as if exhaling smoke burned up all the true facts of what was too much for a girl to ask. She sauntered forward and turned to face Helena, leaning back against the rail at the edge of the boardwalk, which creaked.

“Careful,” Helena said.

“What? Why? I’m already smoking. That’s bad for you, you know,” Joanna said, snorting. And then the whole rail crumbled into so many dry-ass splinters and she fell.

Helena heard the smack, and then the suck of the ocean beneath the boardwalk swallowing her. The cigarette had fallen to the dock. It rolled forward and then disappeared between the boards, a bright light quickly snuffed out as it hit water.

Helena leaned over the edge, hands hovering over where the rail used to be. “Hey!” she shouted.

Nothing.

There were rocks beneath the boardwalk. She knew that from before. Earlier today, yeah, seeing them. Earlier that year, letting Hector fuck her down there in the daylight, secret and exciting and surrounded by sharp stone and trash.

Earlier in her life, when she’d been alone beneath this walk, and the whole world was up above, shopping and gossiping and taking her hometown in as a vacation for a day.

Joanna could’ve hit her head. She could’ve been knocked unconscious, or maybe just knocked out, out, and away. She could be dead already.

Would it be so crazy? For Joanna to die?

Lots of people died.

Helena stood there a moment more. Turned and looked inside, taking another drag of her cigarette. It tasted stale.

Lots and lots of people died. And it was always her fault. This would be no different.

Helena flicked her cig into the water where Joanna’d disappeared. Then she disappeared, too.

*****

Helena Troy killed people. She herself did not know how, but it was what people said: that people died because of her. “For” her, even. She had been nearly stoned to death during the witch hunts over it, and worse, walked away as they all burned behind her. If she had a mother she could remember, maybe that woman would have explained to her what it was she was, why folks dropped around her like stinking flies. Why she oh so consistently survived, lived through plagues and wars completely unscathed, just frowning.

Her mother was probably dead, though. She didn’t remember.

Back at Hector’s, Helena gathered up her clothes and deodorant and shoes in their one Aldi bag with unbroken handles. She then took all of the weed and definitely all the crystal. Felt bad, put some back. But took all the liquor, and then also took her pipe and definitely her bong, which, when clean, was Alice in Wonderland themed.

It was a shame. Hector had been sweet. Not great in bed, but she’d had worse, and had even begun to consider his stubbly face and oniony breath kisses a kind of makeshift home.

The front door opened just as she slipped out the back. “Joanna? Helena? Y’all come home?”

“Thanks,” she whispered, and then Tommy came in and said something, and by the time she was past the yard they were shouting. She flinched as the first shot rang out — it was always like this. She tried, often, to not have people in her life. In Troy she’d tried. They’d still started a war over it.

The problem was that people liked her. They liked how symmetrical her face was, sure, but there was also — as Hector had called it — the “give no shits” attitude.

It was true. She had not cared in a long time. Not really.

The first whining moan of an approaching siren pierced the air. She knew with a sudden grief that Hector had called them after shooting Tommy. That even now, she could see, he was fumbling his gun, trying to put another bullet in the chamber. They’d been shooting at seagulls down by the abandoned amusement park last night. He’d have been almost out.

“What did you do,” he whispered, and suddenly he was looking up, not at her boobs, but finally at her, hovering over the scene. He put the gun in his mouth.

Helena opened her eyes. She was already on the bus.

What could I have ever done?

It had been a century at least since she’d allowed herself to think that so loudly. It was there, though. It was there, and it wouldn’t leave.

She knew where to go.

She hadn’t gone for at least a decade, but she checked the app regularly, and she knew they had a midnight meeting there. It felt bad to come in with drugs, so she wrapped the bong and the herb and the liquor and even the crystal and the pipe in Hector’s old sweatshirt and left it in the backseat of the bus with shaking, unreal hands. Overlaid on that now was a slice of near-future, and Helena could also see someone finding it: a homeless girl, trying to use it as a pillow. Confused by the angles and unwrapping it all. Having a moment of pure sharp joy before oblivion welcomed her.

The bus stopped down the street from Hope, so she took her time walking. She could see a crowd of them outside smoking. Helena lived in fear of killing places like this, where she could walk in and walk out and any death gleaned in passing would not be mysterious or investigated.

She had learned that the hard way, with the first Hector she’d  known. The rubble of society were rarely missed. She could keep their company longer.

“Welcome to Hope,” a cigarette-dry voice said.

Helena took an instinctual step back. The woman smiled, missing two front teeth. Her smile was lovely, though.

“You new?” the lady asked.

“Hardly,” Helena snapped. Then frowned, looking away, “I haven’t been for a while, though.”

The woman laughed. Helena smiled small, and suddenly was horrified to feel them, saltier than the sea, hotter than the cherry of a cig, positively burning down her cheeks.

The woman sighed. The sigh had more weight than Helena ever had. Toothless and warm, this stranger reached out her arms and took Helena into them. Helena gasped, shuddered, and then still cried hard into her neck, thinking of Tommy and Joanna and Hector, oh, Hector. With his purple gamecube and his painted toenails and his obsession with sour cream and potato chips. Hector who looked at her boobs rather than her face when distracted. Who never once tried to hit her. Who didn’t deserve what she had done to him.

“What, you kill him or something?” the lady asked. Helena stiffened. She hadn’t realized she’d been talking.

It didn’t make much difference, though. “I did, but I didn’t,” she said. She shook out another cigarette — her last one, shit — and lit it with quivering fingers. “I kill everyone. But not on purpose. Just by being near them.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “Wow,” she said. “Same.”

Helena glared.

“No, but really,” the woman said, “same. The trick is weird but here goes: it’s to stop whipping yourself for it.”

Helena stared. “I don’t,” she said. She gave no shits. If the woman would just look closer, she’d see that in the symmetry of Helena’s face: there was not a care in the world there. Helena was untouchable: a sociopath of the highest order. A pillar of salt, and she didn’t give a damn where anyone looked. She didn’t care.

“You do, though,” the woman said. She held out a hand and took Helena’s. It shouldn’t be that big a deal: they’d just been embracing. But the woman’s hand was calloused in a way that felt intimate, and Helena flinched. The woman let go.

“There are no victims. Only volunteers.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I meant.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew that I did,” the woman said, smiling. She looked so tired. She looked so safe. “We all come in here with our bag of bodies and our weapon turned on ourselves. Come in,” she said. She opened the door. It smelled like sweat, coffee, lemon disinfectant. Faerie lights twinkled on the ceiling. A door in the back was papered with funeral cards. A wall in the front a rainbow of marker-written names and dates, “What makes you so special? We’ve all killed people. Thousands. Leave your whip at the door. We’ll see how you do at not using it.”

Helena looked down and realized she was indeed holding a whip, bloodied and ancient as herself. She dropped it in the umbrella stand.

Walked inside, and took a deep breath.

And then another.

Photo of Holly Baldwin

BIO: Holly Baldwin is an agender & neurodivergent speculative literature author (and enthusiast!) living in a small ex-row-house standing alone on a dead-end street just outside of Philadelphia. They share their life with five cats, one lizard, two human children, and one adult human. When not crafting complex visions of queer futures, they enjoy midnight diner excursions with friends and daytime faerie house building with their kids. You can find out more at www.holly-baldwin.com.