Killer
By Simon Barget
- 1922 reads
Although I’m a killer, and I know very well that I am one, no one else knows it. I never get caught because I am so good at the killing. Everything I do boils down to it. I will kill in Memphis this morning, tomorrow in Arkansas, and more than ten to twenty men in less than one day. I know it sounds far-fetched. But I want people to know it, else these deaths are just futile. I do them for myself but there is nothing in me that receives satisfaction, and it is the fact of being ignored, of being glossed over that makes it feel it’s not worth my while.
I cannot remember where and how, why I started killing. I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t. I can’t have been a killer at say five or seven or even fifteen but I have blocked out the memories and so I can’t rule it out. I might have been a killing machine in the making. I remember certainly that being with my parents made it more tricky; I remember that you’d need to be alone to kill, or at least the way that I chose to do it. I am aware that since I was with them so much of the time, it was unlikely I was ever unsmothered enough to get my opportunity to unleash -- I never knew my father well enough to know whether he was himself a killer -- not that I see killing as an opportunity, it is more that if I’m foundering alone, my feet start to get itchy, and I start to think about how I could be unloading a gun into a brain, and if I have the gun which I do, and the cartridges which I do, and if I have hands then I can do as I please and can go on a spree and the thought of not filling my time with something rather than nothing inevitably makes me go out and do it.
I do not remember how it started, where I was, I don’t remember the name of my first victim -- there have been many (and it has been so long) -- all I know is that I am overcome by this impulse, this invader, and I cannot see daylight and I cannot move or breathe, do anything without being gripped and the grip is like the need to breathe or like a build up of pressure in my gut or it is like my heart beating overly fast and me feeling the heart muscle throb and twitch and actually suck backwards and in – bom, bom, bom, bom, bom -- and move against that part of the chest that it lies just back of, and it is like me feeling discomfited and unsettled and so ill-at-ease so uncomfortable in my being, and of course when those feelings take over I can hardly sit down, I can only fidget and fiddle, and my thoughts whirl and my stomach turns over and I don’t know where I would like to be, whether inside or out, what I would like to be seeing hearing touching or breathing, and this urge to kill is so overpowering it invades me and I have no choice in the matter and must go out and kill.
When I have finished, when I am cleaning up, when I have wrapped up the body, I feel no respite or peace or there might be the briefest moment when this thing switches off, it is like a moment of forgetting, but then the urge reforms and I find myself needing to kill just as much as before the last drowning. So I don’t do it for relief, there is no relief, there is only succumbing, there is only an urge, an urge never really extinguished.
I cannot ask for anything, but I feel a great sadness. I am killing so much when I know so clearly what life is, when I know how great the value. I know beauty. I know the people I have killed have the right to exist. So many people have to be wasted all because I am unable to sit still, because I am physically unable just not to kill.
I have seen the most beautiful people and still killed them. I have killed those I loved and those I have not been so fond of and I have had enough contempt to want to kill the same person at least more than twice. But the urge is subtle if, like I said, overwhelming. I can admit to this sense of having achieved something, of having got one more person out of the way, out of the way of what I can’t exactly say, even though, the more I do it the worse it gets, for me, for mankind, I feel this sense of putting things finally into order and it is this gnawing sense that I need to (put things in order) and that they never will be that keeps me doing it in a never-ending death line.
If you got to know me you would see I am not vicious. I am soft and sweet. I am vulnerable, even weak in the grossest sense of the word. People think that murderers are strong. I am gentle, is what I am trying to say. I manage not to think about my victims, I can cut myself off. I put them out of mind even when they’re there in plain sight. I am gentle because I see so clearly what I am. I see the futility. Inside I am nothing, so far away from that killing aesthetic. Inside I am happy to be. But on the outside I am….
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Comments
It's really good. But being a
It's really good. But being a killer doesn't seem off kilter enough. Being a killer has its own resonance already so I don't know... I think it should be something more absurd. A bee-keeper? Worm eater? Collecter of tennis racquets.
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Cor, you could give Hannibal
Cor, you could give Hannibal Lecter a run for his money. Bring on the fava beans.
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