by Dan Dillard
*****
The police report stated Jeannie had taken three infants. Rodney Hankins, in the wrong place at the wrong time, saw her with one of them and she killed him as well. She said that her guilt over the deaths was too much and she prayed day and night about it. After her pregnancy, she prayed even more. God, she said, told her to give her baby in penance for her actions. Frank had tried to stop her. She drugged his dinner so he would sleep peacefully at night while she performed her awful tasks but that night he hadn’t eaten much. She took a shovel from the wall and lodged it in his head.
The bodies were frozen in her deep freezer. Once solid, she sawed them into parts and piece by piece, she took them to Anson’s and tossed them into the grinder. Where it went from there was as easy to trace as the delivery logs. Over a million people ate what Anson’s produced. Over a million people ate those children.
Dana didn’t write those details in her story and Sol Harrison didn’t complain for once. The police report was filed as confidential. The only person other than Peg, Dana, Sol and the Sheriff to see it was the Foreman over at Anson’s.
He committed suicide two days later.
..ooOOoo..
MY MIND’S EYE
I am you.
I HATE. I am hatred. I freely admit this. I have never been truly happy and it pains me. Deep in my being something throbs unmercifully with this disease. It’s like a cancer that sits inside your guts and turns them black. It grows until it consumes you. It can make a person do terrible things. I don’t think I have it in me to do the deeds I see in my mind’s eye, but oh, what magical deeds they are.
Is this an illness that a prescription might cure? Or some simple therapy? Would being asked probing questions about my feelings eventually lead me not to feel them anymore? No, likely they would lead to the demise of said therapist, if only in my head where so many lay dead and broken by the daydream version of me. That version is fierce…and unrelenting…and knows neither hesitation nor remorse for the things he does. He lives only to serve the beast that paces, agrily in my belly, paces that take us further and further from control.
Every day the rubber band—the only safety net for the public that surrounds me—is pulled a little tighter. I wait for it to snap from either reaching its potential or because it’s rotted over time by a constant barrage of the ignorant things that happen whenever and wherever people gather.
On a daily basis, I paint beautiful visages of shiny, crimson-spattered revenge using a palette made of those I despise. The bloated, self-absorbed armchair politicians. Those who argue wielding facts not self-discovered, but forced upon them. Those without the testicular—or ovarian—fortitude to make informed decisions on their own. I would destroy those who seek only the information they want to find and call it truth to make room for those who seek the truth first, and call it information.
Spouters of numbers as gospel could simply become one of their own trusted statistics and I would be no more or less satisfied.
I hate the cruel, though this may seem hypocritical given my recent admissions. I fantasize about returning their favors tenfold, and with glee. Though I claim rights to lay waste to people based upon my judgment, I hate the racist, the homophobe and those who have decided there is nothing new under the sun. Their decisions will never change.
I abhor a closed mind and I welcome its suffering.
There’s a man in my office who spends his days building one brick wall after the other. He makes a comfortable living by describing only the reasons why simple requests can’t be accommodated, only providing opposition to progress, never solutions. He merely presents all the ways it will fail. This makes me sad.
It also saddens me that in reality, I would be given only one chance to make art with his innards. Only one stroke of the brush would be allowed because it is perishable. Each of my displays is complete in and of itself, never to be created again. As we are each unique, so shall be our demise. This is why I dream of carving roses of flesh from his skin, creating beauty where there was only ugliness and filth. To date, I only dream. In dreams, I can recreate the masterwork over and again, until it is perfect.
I am a perfectionist.
I envision cutting out that tongue which only brings bad news and carving a pleasant smile on his face and stitching the eyelids wide open in a grotesque and gleaming grin. I would begin by breaking each finger. Snap-snap-snap-snap-snap.
The luscious screams of agony—curses—without a tongue. Their true message, a symphony of joy.
Only then would the emails and memos from this human barricade cease. That would be a grand start, freeing me to take my time savoring the gurgling pleas for mercy. I wouldn’t stop just as he wouldn’t help.
You see, one has to apply torture in the proper order with the proper technique or the quarry will pass out, or worse—bleed out and expire too soon. This will not do. It must last. The pain he has caused assistance deserves to be paid back.
I cannot make this vision reality of course, as someone would hear me working and put a stop to it. The office is too busy a place for my rubber band to break and would never allow me the time to finish my work, not if I am to give it the care it needs. I would end up unfulfilled.
