Alien In The Car

by Pete Howells

The day I got rid of my sister made me really happy. Happy in a content, relaxed, glad-I’ve-finished-that job kind of way. When I stabbed Golly up I was buzzing; just buzzing. I felt like I’d smacked it - I was Jack the Biscuit - but Golly is another story. His exit was my entrance. Abigail was the beginning.

  I cut her up, slowly and deliberately, into four easily disposable pieces. I hacked at her knees then cut straight into her stomach. I took my time with her neck. She would not be properly dead until I’d sliced through her neck. In fact I couldn’t have taken longer with her neck if I’d tried.

  I studied her face. Not as an artist would; although, as I lay on the green crispness of that early summer lawn, I had to admit there was a photogenic beauty there; a symmetry that is much admired by fashion photographers and lechers alike. Her mousy hair frozen in the lilting breeze, her lipstick-stained lips pouting deliberately: provocative and full of hidden promise. Broken promise and lies. Yes I studied her face for time. Long enough to make me happy with my work, to make me feel relaxed and glad. I gave, “a joyful cry unto the Lord,” and ripped her head from what was left of her body.

  With her out of the way, my next task was to carefully align the remainder of the photograph. I turned it over and laid the pieces on the grass. It was too spongy. My knee was too curved and uneven, so I placed it on a large flat stone and, with sellotape deftly ripped from the roll, I stuck it with panache. (Yes I knew ‘deft’, I knew ‘panache’ - I had become a man of letters). I turned the image over and there was me, aged eight and next to my mother, as content and as natural as a dancing banana.

  The remains of Abigail I arranged among some scraps of newspaper and a few dry twigs in the rough shape of a tepee. I poured some lighter fuel over the bitch and set fire to the lot.

  She burned slower than I would have imagined with greens and blues and a kind of ultra-violet above the yellow flame of the dry paper. Her legs became cancerous, black and pockmarked and her face - her face twisted. It was pained and for the first time that I remember, Abigail wept.

  I often used to imagine I was back in that little garden. I knew every root of grass, every branch on every tree, the unused special place behind the garage. I was only there in my head, in my deep imaginings, but the photograph was real, the fire was real, the fumes of the fuel and the gravelent odour of the funeral flowers were real. It all seemed super-real in the cell that had been my home for the last eight years. My gaff, my pad, my residential place of abode, my peter. My house, mi casa, my drum, my torture, my university study. My life, my all and my everything was real.

  My home. My god.

  The night that your mother has been cremated isn’t the best time to consider your own lot - you’re too emotionally charged - but maybe that’s inevitable. It certainly focuses the mind.

  I left the remnants of my own little pyre in the centre of my peter, tacked the amended photograph of me and my mum to the wall by my pillow and went to sleep on the summer grass of my imaginings.