STILETTO KILLER … A Surmise

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

“She told me if anybody screwed with her they’d get a stiletto heel in the eye,”

 - her former apartment manager told the TV news.

Alf and Ana drank tequila at the club until closing.

Ana wore a tight, green dress. Alf said she looked like a whore. 

Back at the apartment, the neighbors heard screams.

“The defense will prove she was a battered woman,” her lawyer told the press. 

She was too short when the stilettos came off but her feet ached.

She had to stand on tiptoe to reach him, for Christ’s sake.

Women are always losers in Texas.

Ana alleged: “He cursed in Swedish when he beat me.” 

She’d read Swedes beat their women in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

In the early morning hours, Ana stabbed her lover thirty one times.

The stiletto heel fused to her fist.

When the police arrived Ana was covered in blood.

In that green dress she looked like Christmas.

(CNN) -- It may have been a vicious murder or the unintentional result of a

lover's quarrel. Either way, the death of a Texas college professor stands

out for the weapon the killer allegedly used: one of her own stilettos.

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"Stiletto Killer ... A Surmise" was first published in The Mas Tequila Review, 2015

L.A. poet Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Plume, The 

American Journal of Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Diode, Nashville Review, Wide Awake, Poets of Los 

Angeles, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She’s the author of 5 poetry collections; How I 

Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen (2014), State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (2015), Enter 

Here (2017), Junkie Wife (2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (2019). EROTIC, New & Selected, 

publishes in 2020 from New York Quarterly. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net 

nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. www.alexisrhonefancher.com