Heartache. She has many faces. When I had my heart broken for the first time it wasn't just a boy who stomped all over my heart, it was me who let him. No free pass for him though, he sucked. But, I can't put all the blame on him. He disrespected me again and again. My time, my body, my family, and I let him. Arguably my fault.

I was a junior in high school. Smart, creative, sarcastic, self assured, and self conscious of my looks. In a small rural school everyone knew everyone. My crush from the 6th grade was still my crush junior year. But after all those years he hadn't shown any interest. I was convinced I wasn't much to look at, wasn't worth anyone's time. But, that spring his number popped up in my phone. It kept popping up for the next two months, I was shocked. Did he like me?

This boy was an athlete, responsible, tall, and on track to be Valedictorian. A parents dream? So it seemed. I thought we had a lot in common, I thought he was quite a catch. I treated him as such, gushing over him to my friends, waiting on his every text. And maybe I should have see the red flags, but I joyfully ignored them. I was a naïve princess skipping through a forest fire, completely oblivious if you can imagine that.

At the beginning I think he truly liked me. But, looking back on it, that time was short lived. After a couple months he began to cancel our dates. "I'll pick you up at 5." I would spend the whole day getting ready, shower, shave, moisturize, stress. Five would roll around and nothing. My stomach in knots. After ten minutes or so another text would come in, "Hey I'm not feeling good, I can't come over." We'd do this little dance at least once or twice a week. Strange though, for all the times he "wasn't feeling well" he never missed a single day of school, or baseball game. But, like a young girl in love I ignored this.

My parents and brother saw right through this charade, trying softly to tell me this wasn't right. But, I ignored their warnings, happily planning date after date. Somewhere in this timeline he told me he loved me. That was the fatal shot. Nothing he did could make me question his words. "But he loves me." It went farther of course. I won't rehash what happened behind closed doors. But, the classic story of popular athlete and insecure girl, where no doesn't seem to mean anything isn't too far off.

So there I was, ten months into the relationship. Miserable, tired, angry underneath it all, and I still wanted to be with him. He was coming over on Thursday night. I was waiting for the text that he couldn't make it. But, I got a different text from a friend, "Hey just so you know, Scott was telling people that he's breaking up with you." Was I shocked? No, he hadn't said he loved me in weeks, but I guess I never took the hint. He picked me up in his grey truck. Opened the door for me without a word. I could feel it building up between us.

He didn't apologize, he didn't sympathize. Just said he was done, he didn't love me any more, and he really didn't want to try to work things out. Was this the part where he broke my heart? No, not exactly, he had broken my heart nearly every day for months. But this was the day I broke my own heart. I sat in that stupid truck with that mean, stupid boy and I begged him to stay, I asked him to love me, to try just one more time. How embarrassing.

It has taken me a long time to forgive myself for that day, for the whole thing really. I had spent my whole life thinking I was independent, smart, a girl with a good head on my shoulders. But, when a tall boy who I thought was a "good guy" broke me down and disrespected me in every way possible I let him right in. So, all of this goes to say, listen to your parents when they tell you someone is a piece of shit.

He was a quiet man with a basset hound that would not shut up. Which was why I stood on his doorstep at two a.m. the night before he was arrested asking him once again to please bring the dog inside. Humphrey, the soft-spoken man, answered (like he always did), listened to my polite pleas, murmured something about bones and then gingerly closed his evergreen door like it was a friend of his. As many would, I deduced from the pleasant interaction that he would be tossing a bone to the basset hound to quiet it as soon as I walked away. However, in retrospect, it was naïve of me; out of the dozens of times I had dropped by since he moved in a year ago, that dog never stopped wailing because I asked nicely.

So, perhaps it was my own fault for expecting anything different. Fifteen minutes passed, and my Monday evening was still being invaded by the sound of deep howls like a mother weeping. Feeling duped, I tugged my slippers back onto my feet and stomped outside, decidedly weary from the recent nights I’d had no rest, but also fueled by three cups of black coffee. Humphrey was not going to do this to me again; I’d make sure of it.

His backyard was predominantly covered in the shadow of a large willow tree, despite the spotlights of neighboring houses tickling its edges. I crept up on the left side of the wooden fence and peeked over without pretense. Immediately below me, the hound was howling, a lost spirit in a storm at my fence. I wanted to squeeze his lungs through his nostrils.

But I didn’t. Instead, I brought out the turkey bone I had dug out of my garbage can and held it over the fence, a few feet above his reverberating skull. The cries continued underneath me, until I banged the bone against the cedar like a dinner bell. With this, he acknowledged me, snatching the bone from my grip and lying down where he was to chomp silently. I smiled, and dumped several more scraps from dinner beside him to keep him occupied long enough for me to fall asleep. I paused only to observe the dozens of bones that were left scattered and unchewed about Humphrey’s yard. I thought it was strange, but then again, Humphrey and his dog were not normal.

Returning to my home, I went right to bed. I thought no more of Humphrey, his hound, or the bone graveyard, falling asleep as soon as I lied down to rest. However, sometime an hour later, the dog must have finished his meal, because the wails began once again shriller and (if I was not mistaken) angrier than earlier. I screamed into my pillow like a lunatic and trekked back outside without shoes on my feet.

The hound was howling back at the bottom of my fence, the remnants of the leftovers I gave him strewn on the moist grass. I couldn’t tell for sure, but they seemed unfinished. Empty-handed and desperate for a conclusion, I rapped on the inside of the fence again, hoping to draw his attention. He turned to look up at me, his mouth closed and quiet.

And the howls continued. From under where I was standing.

I ran then. Not because I was a coward, but because, to put it plainly, I thought I might be hallucinating. It was easier to blame the nights of sleeplessness than to believe a person was truly imprisoned underneath my feet. Nonetheless, I had every intention of returning and getting the police examine the spot in the ground eventually. First, however, I just needed to get away from there.

I sprinted and then walked for several miles, until halting at a twenty-four hour diner where I ordered more coffee and a plate of banana chocolate chip pancakes. By the time I finished, the sun had risen, and the morning rush was arriving. With a belly full of nerve, I decided to trudge back to my house and reexamine the patch of dirt by my fence, possibly to alert the authorities if needed. Yet, the earth was silent, so I decided I must have been delirious, and walked into my home to prepare for another workday.

Twelve minutes after five p.m. I pulled back into my driveway, the memory of the night before truly feeling like a dream. However, as soon as I saw the police outside Humphrey’s house, dragging him out in handcuffs, I remembered. A team of white jumpsuits scurried through his backyard, clustered near the back right of the dirt-covered yard around a dilapidated shed I barely noticed. I rubbed my eyes as they appeared to disappear into a doorway in the soil underneath it.

I ambled past the neighbors gathered around on the sidewalk and parts of my front lawn like flies, whispering their speculations and a few buzzing in my ear. I shooed them away, leaving them to their shock and confusion, and for the rest of the evening I sat on my side stoop watching the investigation. A few of the white spacemen put some of the hound’s bones in evidence bags, chatting (rather loudly) about how the man’s shallow basement made it so the bones could not be buried. Eventually, I also started hearing thumping from under my fence, presumably when the spacemen walked far enough into Humphrey’s hidden basement.

The thumps continued further than I expected, however, leading right beside me beneath my humble garden of zucchinis and sunflowers. I shivered, realizing in that moment why the howls of Humphrey’s ‘dog’ always seemed so deafening to me.

As the dusk embraced the sky above the neighborhood, Humphrey’s yard was lit for the first time in the darkness by portable lamps the police had arranged around the perimeter. A detective came to visit me around then and asked me a handful of generic questions. I told him who I was, and I told him it was all quite surprising. And when asked if I knew anything about the woman, the one Humphrey had been holding for weeks underneath my fence, I shook my head grimly and solemnly.

The following morning, instead of rushing out the door to my job, I lingered in my kitchen scanning the news on my cellphone. It didn’t take long to find the headline about the quiet man and the six women he had taken since his wife died last winter, yet there was only one woman I cared about: Lina Tafani. She was his final victim, dying just a few hours before the police raided his home. No family was left behind, but a photo has been used of her smiling with a young man looking happy. The police say she likely fought Humphrey and almost escaped, judging by the fresh scratches on Humphrey’s skin and the lump on his forehead.

However, they are not certain, because the struggle probably would have made quite a racket, and apparently, no one heard a thing that evening.

Hold it in like medicine.

And let it take you to a place you've never been.

As your soul floats from your skin.

You should know this is as close to heaven as you'll ever get.

Watch your problems transform into a cloud of mist.

I know the world is mix-and-match.

And your life is tick-for-tac.

But you finally found a fix.

After tonight you won't remember that

Or think of this.

Just twist the pipe with light hits.

And look into Crystal's eyes.

When they ask why your lips are so chapped.

Just say your livin' life.

And when you lose your job.

Just say you're allergic to mice.

And when you run out of cash.

I'll spot you a bag.

And if you can't pay.

Well, that's okay.

You can sell some ass.

And years from now when you want to change.

Everyone will still smell your past.

And I'll exploit your pain.

Until you see me as your dad.

Then we'll refill the pipe and take endless drags.

Oh! How good it feels to be livin' bad.

Hold it in like medicine.

You were twenty-seven then...