Novel Excerpts |
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Flesh cuts easily with a razor-sharp knife. Immediately after death, blood flows only a little less quickly than it does before death. But without the thumping, pumping of the heart, it soon slows down. Cross-marks are easy to make. Circles are harder because you have to twist the knife around to make the end join up with the start. Sometimes the body will quiver as you carve your message. When it first happens it scares the shit out of you, and you might even spring back from the corpse and yelp, quietly of course. But you realize that it’s just a nervous tremor going through the cadaver, not that she’s coming back to life; and although it’s spooky, it doesn’t freak you out any more. Naughts and crosses, neatly carved along her back - there’s method in my madness. Sometimes neck to buttocks, sometimes buttocks to neck - and there’s madness in my method. My knife is of the kind used to cut up balsa wood when making a model airplane. An airplane that one tenderly creates, only to see it crash into the ground at the end of its first flight, the heavy engine in its nose causing it to plummet rather than glide when the fuel runs out. We all need to have ways of wasting our time, to take our minds off the pointlessness of life. Pointlessness combats pointlessness. The existential irony thrills me as I assiduously go about my carving.
Ire Unleashed
"Yer promised, yer fuckin promised, didn’t yer?" he shouted, sounding more like a little boy negotiating with his mother. ‘Yes Henry, I promised, and I’ll stand by that promise, and so will every other police officer out here, I guarantee it." "Yer fucking better ad," he shouted, and then repeated himself, more quietly, as if reflecting on it. Nothing was heard for a while, and then Spencer’s heart stopped as a shotgun blast rang out, followed a few seconds later by another. Everyone ducked. Devons - who had every right to think the shots were directed at her - had the presence of mind to drag the sister down with her, and the two of them were crouched behind a patrol car, the sister screaming hysterically. "What the fuck is e doing? What the fuck is the stupid bastard shooting at me for? I’m trying ter fucking elp im. Fuckin lunatic!" Spencer could see the house, and as he watched he saw the shotgun come flying through a pane of glass in one of the downstairs windows and land in the overgrown and litter-strewn mess that constituted the garden. Seconds later, the front door flew open and the man walked out with his hands in the air. He was swaggering as he walked down the garden path, but before he arrived at the broken front gate four policemen jumped on him and slammed him to the ground. Spencer winced as he saw Henry disappear under a mass of well-filled police uniforms – he would have done better to have a horse fall on him. A half strangulated cry puffed from Henry as the impact with the concrete of the garden path knocked the wind out of him. |
Futile Lives
The noose was in front of me, the rope neatly coiled round and round on itself above the dangling loop. I desperately searched for the word to describe the tidy knot, as if defining it would put me in control. "It’s called the collar," said Leo, laughing, interpreting my thoughts and ridiculing them. Then, not having noticed them before, I saw my wife and my two daughters standing a few yards away. They were dressed in long black cloaks trailing to the ground behind them. Their heads were hooded and bowed, and I thought they were crying, but then they looked up and I saw that my daughters were laughing, laughing so much that tears were rolling down their cheeks. ... I felt the noose on my shoulders, then tightening around my neck, then digging into my flesh. An indescribable, giddying fear enveloped me. I looked down at the trap door beneath my feet, which I noticed were encased in shiny black boots. There was a crash, a whooshing noise, and I felt myself falling, but instead of seeing space pass before me, I saw numbers, and I realized I was scanning down a column of memory locations on the printout of post mortem dump.
Shoot Out |
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Fathering Sin by Brian Staff |
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