=The Line-Up=

I'm called in to view a police line-up by mistake but no one wants to hear that. On the other side of the glass the men are paraded in. What a motley collection! All different sizes, shapes, and colors. I recognize him immediately, but I pause a beat or two just to make it look good. "It's him," I say, pointing to the third one from the left.

"Are you sure?" the lead detective asks.

"Positive." 

It's funny how you pick the same guy over and over and over no matter how often it ends in disappointment. It's a crime, really. Apparently he abducted me, held me prisoner for eight-and-a-half years, and made me his sex slave. Nearly all that time he managed to brainwash me into thinking I was happily married. What a monster! Lucky for me, he got careless. He blinked long enough for me to collect my wits and get away.

"You're not the only woman he's done this to," the lead detective says when he senses my certainty already wavering. "And you won't be the last," his partner finishes.

All the same, it's getting harder and harder to be so self-righteous and I'm beginning to think that the only reason I picked him in the first place is that he reminded me of the man before him and the man before that and before that and that they all probably reminded me of some kind of hermaphroditic mash-up of the old parental unit—mother and father fused together. 

"Don't even think it," one of the detectives warns.

"Why not?" I reply, defiantly, but I already know the answer.

I shudder. 

A mental images flashes in my mind's eye: a great red bull sinking to its knees in the amphitheater, exhausted from the fight, blood foaming around it's muzzle, it's thick skin quivering with picador darts, it's sad, sunken yellow eye rolling up to the pitiless sun, the blank sky. 

"He's actually quite innocent!" I shout, though the men on the other side of the glass can't hear me any more than they can see me. "They're all innocent!"

Both detectives frown. 

Meanwhile my poor heart is lying in a heap in the trampled dust of the amphitheater, shuddering, bleeding out, deaf, breathing its last.

The horrible crowd erupts in an orgasmic frenzy, shouting as one for the coup de grace.