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I don’t know if anyone remembers one of FergC’s challenges on the Cloud when he asked us to get in touch with our darker writing selves and be the villain? I hated it. Sobbed as I wrote, in fact, but my goodness I was stretched by it and just a tiny bit shocked at how wicked I could be.
I hope to stretch you now…
There’s a body.
Whether you’ve stumbled across it or are responsible for it is entirely up to you. But the focus is not the body; I’m not looking for gore. The focus is the motive, the setting, or the impact this act/discovery has on you.
You have 450 words. Don’t hold back.
(Certainly stretched and apologies for one fleeting mention of blood!)
444 words excluding title
Behind Closed Doors
Neighbours stood around gawking. I saw them from the window as I stood handcuffed to a policeman.
Our quiet cul de sac was a scene of mayhem with ambulance and police cars; blue lights flashing.
The paramedics stretchered him out in a body bag. Whispers. What had happened in the respectable household, whose recent occupants kept themselves to themselves and caused no bother?
The ambulance drove away. The police ushered away the small crowd and began cordoning off our home: the scene of crime. I was led out with my head covered and put into the back of a police car in the manner which is shown on tv. Strange how a silly detail made me smile at that serious time. I was going to have plenty of time in the cell to reflect on this and how matters had got so out of hand between me and him. I can’t bear to say his name. That way what I’ve done doesn’t feel so personal.
Formalities over, I sit in the locked cell trying to keep composed, knowing what my grim future holds, but I cannot feel regret. He deserved it.
I shivered and that was when the vision came of stabbing him with amazing accuracy right through the heart. He fell to the kitchen floor with the chef’s knife oozing his blood. It ran over his body and onto the tiles; a red river.
Did I really dial 999 and admit to killing him? He did not scream, being taken by complete surprise, so no neighbour was alerted. It had to have been me. So I suppose I was regretful. I realise now that I was in shock then and still am.
I lie down on the hard bed and shut my eyes, hoping that sleep comes to shut out all of this horror.
All that happens is that my mind races. My life does not exactly flash before me, but fragments come and go in a whirl of mixed emotions.
A romantic beginning which grew into what I believed to be a perfect relationship. We didn’t marry, but moved into the house together; the icing on the cake for me. I’d always dreamt of living in a luxurious home, coming from a less than salubrious neighbourhood.
The change of abode also marked the change in him.
A raspy laugh escapes my throat. Cliche: he began to show his true colours.
This morning I could no longer take the abuse or the betrayals and so here I am as broken in spirit as his body in our home.
My defence? How could those gawkers know what went on behind our closed doors?
Episode from long-running tale ‘The Blacksmith’s wife’
Kick a corpse to life and you’ll inevitably disturb carrion.
Tao knew this but only recalled it on attempting to leave his inn-room. The body that had earlier impeded his exit messenger for the man whose name Tao had evoked in hope of boosting his financial standing, believing those who abhorred the trappings of authority were like to have a minimal grasp of underworld allegiance. Face to face he questioned his own sanity.
The man’s gaze alone persuaded him to admit he carried letters he was willing to sell on, falsely reassuring , ‘No need to be reticent, Tao, all is known.’
And Tao’s recollection of the dagger concealed within his sleeve, merely confirmed the man could read his mind. ‘Think that again and ‘twill be you who die. So long as I’ve the letters you stole in Lisbon I’ll remain reticent about your other crimes. The Englishman in Dublin did not require them?’
‘He would not pay.’
‘ Certainly, I shall not.’ Snake-smiling eyes watched Tao forge features to neutrality before adding, ‘Not until you’ve dealt with Carrion Jack.’
‘”Dealt?’
’He has a thing of mine.’
‘You want it back?’
‘Not now she’s been used.’
Tao and Carrion Jack had fought but also thieved together, once shared a cell. Jack understood Tao’s abhorrence for altruism; appreciated that receiving payment for his letters necessitated his dealing with the woman Jack had appropriated for himself, now merely warning,
‘Unwise to kill one who understands the use of herbs, e’en though a witch; necessary you deceive.’
’Witch?’
Tao, imagining old crone, cross-finger swore his oath, only to instantly be made wary when, stepping from the shadows. young and comely, with knowing eyes of lichen green, addressing: him: ‘Had you a brother Gabriel?’
Tao’s stare red-black accusation. Jack’s innocence opaque: ‘I never said! I never! But I did tell you to treat witches wary…’
Tao, to her ‘My brother lives.’ Eyes tried to slide but hers. pennyroyal effective in aborting his untruths, momentarily barbecued his tongue.
‘His wife?’
‘You left her for dead. I saved her. Your brother near died of grief, survived only on her living. I’m one of many who’ve sworn revenge on you.’
Tao gathered strength. ‘As I swore to deal with you.’
Jack, mistakenly forgotten:
‘Both of you have first to answer unto me. I’ve a healthy respect for herbalists but beware, my moss-eyed maiden, I know stronger ones than you. And, Tao, like you, I straddle the law when needful, but would draw the line at murder of a with-child woman.’
‘She’s not dead.’
‘No thanks to you.’ [440 words including title]
Care Package
450 words
Her brother and she were the youngest of five, he the youngest of all.
“Follow me!” he called, pedalling hard. To keep up, when he was eight and she nine, stole her breath. Also, there were more interesting things to do: reading a book, doing piano practice. Soul-bolstering things. Becoming your own person.
Ahead, her brother fell off his bike onto the grass verge. He lifted his palm. “I’m bleeding!” She looked. A surface graze, redness but no oozing blood. Pitiful. And at home, stupid teenage sisters who talked only to each other. Parents who’d grown out of wanting children, leaving her with her brother without checking if she minded.
Banging the piano keys helped.
**
She is sitting at a table opposite a police detective.
“Tell me about the fall,” he says.
“My brother was hurrying to get to work, slipped on the stairs. Banged his head against the wall.”
It was ten years ago, her brother thirty-eight.
“Who found him?” said the detective.
The detective surely knew this. The police had all her brother’s medical records.
“I did,” she says. “His office rang me as next of kin. They were wondering where he was. I rang for an ambulance.”
“Were you alarmed?”
“Of course.” She frowns at this man who is her own age, old enough to understand but being obtuse. “Though I didn’t know his brain was damaged or that injuries can get worse over time.” She hears her rising anger and tones it back down. “I didn’t push him down the stairs.”
“You picked up the pieces.”
She stares. Fools make statements of the bloody obvious.
Out of hospital her brother had no job, didn’t know what to eat or how to cross a road. Their parents were dead, the other sisters too busy, blah blah. Lapidary memories of their excuses. “You work from home. He can live with you.” “There’ll be help from social services.”
His metabolism changed. He gained weight; the local council’s budget for home care slimmed. He developed diabetes, sore joints, breathing difficulties, bad-tempered mood changes. She applied for help to community groups and charities, first asking how to fill in their forms. The sisters offered inconsistent aid plus their bafflement that everything wasn’t easier. Every day brought her an expenditure of energy that would never be regained.
But his pill regime. A little bit of experimentation. Altered doses. One day he didn’t wake up.
**
The detective is inscrutable. She feels tighter for taking control yet frayed at what’s happened. The detective seems like a wooden post in seawater, one on which oysters make a home.
“Will there be a library in prison?” she says.
“Yes.”
“A piano?”
“Possibly. You might be lucky.”
Body of evidence.
It’s not as though this is the first body I’ve seen, and it’s not as though this is the first person I’ve killed. As a death it was unremarkable: quick, expected, and I imagine she knew nothing about it. A clean shot through the back of the head in mid-conversation. Only a few of my targets have been so lucky, but my intention was different. This time I was more concerned with the effect on me than on somebody else.
Looking at her now, I’m slowly coming to terms with that. It’s interesting. I’m aware of some things that I hadn’t considered before. The most obvious is that she was the person I would have liked to discuss the death with most of all. She would have understood—probably. She was in tune with my thoughts in a way that nobody else was. The next thing is ironic. We were discussing an old photograph of us as teenagers and she was in the middle of explaining something when she turned away, turning the picture into the light, and I took the opportunity.
On reflection, a mistake, because she is—was—the only person who could finish that explanation.
By far the strangest thing was the feeling that my world had got smaller. I’d anticipated this, but until she was sprawled there on the floor, I hadn’t fully understood it. While she was alive, she was like a universe of experience that impinged on mine. Because she had been close to me, I’d seen some of that universe and it had changed parts of mine. She had a hand in establishing the way I viewed the world. She had a part in my understanding of it.
In an instant that stopped. The transition happened quickly, it was nearly imperceptible, but the impact was huge.
People have always been objects to me. They’re just things that move around like dodgem cars. Brownian motion. Sometimes they speak to me, and I’ve learned to respond in ways that please them. I suspect that some of them, maybe all of them, hide a universe as huge as hers. I’ve tried all manner of ways to discover it and I’m certain that they reveal something as they die. I have yet to decipher what it is.
Has this been worthwhile?
That’s unclear. Maybe I should have started with Bobby or Kevin, people I’m not quite so close to because using her was an expensive trial. By and large I’m not pleased with how it went, but it will give me a lot to think about I suppose.
434 words including title
Apologies, all. Just home from work and, while the mind is willing, the body is most definitely wrecked. It’ll be tomorrow before I get a chance to read the entries.
Thank you for indulging me with these entries and apologies once again for being so late with the results.
@Jill: you gave me exactly what I asked for – an insight into the mind of a killer – in this case, a victim of domestic abuse who was finally pushed too far. Your words paint a quiet picture of an unseen tempest.@Sandra: Your words paint an entirely different picture. Dark. Self-serving. I love the language that weaves motive through the half-light of danger and complexity. While I have sympathy for Jill’s killer, I have none at all for yours.
@Libby: How awful. That quiet unravelling of her own life. The harm caused by such a ‘harmless’ accident. I feel the suffering, the anger, the relief and release. I really hope there is a piano in prison.@Ath: That voice; so understated and so matter of fact. That shrug of regret that underpins the words. Who is this person? And yet, I find myself wanting to know more about her. It’s not going to happen now though, is it?
I worried that nobody would be on board with this month’s theme, but you gave me variety and depth and some unexpected insights. I hand the baton this month to Libby who resurrected a memory from when I was a newly qualified nurse trying to console a distraught daughter who, in the face of fatigue, lack of support, and being totally overwhelmed by her mother’s dementia, confessed to having slapped her.
No need for apologies, Seagreen – I’m sure we all understand the delay. You set an intriguing challenge and have given a comprehensive and thoughtful judgment on each darkly intriguing entry. I loved all the others and echo the reasons you have expressed.
Congratulations, Libby. Well deserved. As I read, I could almost feel myself in the character’s shoes – from childhood unfairness and frustration of responsibility thrust upon her until she was finally worn down by the situation and took action which would lead to her incarceration.
I look forward to what you may set for October’s challenge.
I was pleased to have my mind returned to the time I effortlessly wrote dark, so thank you for this, challenge, Sea, ad well as all the contributors – entertaining every one, but I confess to especially enjoying Libby’s contempt for the policeman.
Thank you @Seagreen ! The prompt was a challenge, in a good way, and I’m very pleased to have been picked from such a strong collection of stories.
Thank you @Athelstone , and thanks also to Jill, Sandra and Seagreen for kind and encouraging comments.
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