Robert wiped the bloody blade on Eileen’s pants and then replaced it in the sheath at his back. He looked around and made sure no one was in the parking lot before he stood and went back to his car. He climbed into the driver’s seat and started his car, then drove slowly from the parking lot and out to the street.

Once on the road he sighed, and then took a sanitary wipe from a container on the dashboard and gently wiped Eileen’s blood from his thumb ring and his hands. With a second wipe he removed any trace of her blood from the steering wheel, his car keys and the door handle. When he came to a dark section of the road he rolled down his window and tossed the soiled wipes into the night. He would clean his knife later on when he stopped at a motel to sleep.

He was only an hour away from the state line, so he would drive into the next state before he stopped for the night. It was more difficult for the cops to track him if he moved from state to state after an…incident. As his car sliced through the darkness, Robert idly turned the gold ring on his thumb.

“I loved all of you,” he said softly to the night, “more than you will ever know. While we always had some fun together, eventually you would grow tired of me and want to leave.” Tears began to well up in his eyes as he thought of all the women he once loved, and whose blood now stained his ‘memory’ ring. “Now I will always have you with me,” he said as light from a pair of oncoming headlights glinted off his ring, “and you can never leave.”

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