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The butcher

The butcher

Published Sep 29, 2023 Updated Sep 29, 2023 Culture
time 5 min
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The butcher

The first night


Killing For the sheer sake of punishment, crippling, tearing, removing from a living being all that distinguishes it from beasts. A mass of flesh and bone. His purpose is as clear and simple as the words he left in the letter he sent to the Neapolis police station. He moves his black van through the night, looking for prey against which to vent his hatred and rage. He patrols the streets in the dimly lit suburbs of Neapolis every night, minutely, looking for a victim worth risking death for. He just wants to see her suffer. He just wants to see her cry. I the light from the street lamps rhythmically illuminates the interior of the van, while he stares at the road ahead, not looking at anything or paying attention. Driving is like an automatic gesture, alienating him from his thoughts. As he drives he no longer exists. It is as if all the voices that steadily occupy his head fade away, as if distracted by looking at the trees he passes on the sides of the road and the lights inside the windows of houses. He constantly wonders if God exists, and if he possesses a soul. If he exists, I cannot kill and torture. If he exists I might have a purpose, I might be alive for a reason. I cannot believe that my life here has no more meaning than a motionless stone, so ephemeral and short. Each hour seems like an eternity, yet the years chase each other so fast I can't keep up with them. My memory no longer works, I can't remember anything. Everything that should be positive I experience as an affront. I cannot give myself a moment of peace. I cannot appreciate anything. Everything that is beautiful is distant to me. Feelings themselves have become foreign and hostile to me. I viscerally hate everything, hate feeding myself and hate drinking. My life is steeped in hatred, my every gesture makes me suffocate in thick, black hatred, and I deserve it. My duty is to die, I should do it now, I crave to die, I crave it so madly that I dream of it at night, every night, of being killed on purpose or by accident. 

Every morning I wake up, sad and disappointed to be alive, to be born. If I had never been born. If only I had never been born. I don't even have the courage to hang myself. I want a knife in my hand, as I run toward a policeman, as I rant and shout at the top of my lungs, waving it over my head. I run with my eyes closed waiting to feel a sudden heat and fall to the ground with a dull thud, lifeless. I want someone to take charge of my death. I want to die without being able to decide anything. To die. I want to kill tonight. I want to kill everything. I want to kill. 

Here she is at last. A girl, on the sidewalk, walks insecurely, stretches out both hands toward a tree and approaches it in short strides, then puts her full weight on it. She is walking home and is drunk.

The van is parked at the end of the street, about fifty meters away from the hedge that lines the sidewalk, behind which he hides. He sits on the ground like children, his legs outstretched and his toes pointing upward, his head tilted a little on his shoulder and his mouth open, while his wide eyes look toward the van. The only thing he feels is the air going in and out of his lungs through his teeth as he waits for her. He does not even feel like he is there. He doesn't know anything. Behind him he hears a soft noise, a door opening and closing. He, without closing his mouth, turns around, laying his hands on the floor, but without moving his legs. His stunned eyes rest on the door of the house, as his breathing becomes increasingly labored. She stares at the lights sequentially turning on and off in the house. "She came in." "Chaos saved her." "Chaos is not my master, its laws have no power over me." He never knows whether he says things out loud or just thinks them. The body he uses is not his own, and he struggles to understand these things. Waiting in that disheveled position, he sees a small window on the side of the house light up and then open. He stands upright. As his head dangles as if tied to his body through a rope over which he has no control, and his eyes roll in their sockets as he tries to keep his gaze fixed on the window. Moving slowly, she tries to step on her heels as little as possible, to take it slow. Five meters from the open window he can hear gasps of vomit coming from the room. It is the bathroom, and someone is sick inside. From where he is he can see the backyard; his attention is drawn to a black figure, hidden behind the house, huge, shapeless, with five limbs protruding disheveled from a malformed body. The deformed head, in which two white fangs stand out. This figure stands up, and begins to prance on his legs, raising his shoulders close to his head and holding his three arms along his body. He smiles at the beast, brings his hands to his face and begins scratching the skin of his cheeks, staring at it in fascination. This one finds a bicycle and sits on it, grasping the handlebars with two hands and a pedal with the third, while holding his legs apart and his mouth open. With a rhythmic movement of his arm, which is followed by his torso and head, he leaves behind the house and disappears. He pulls the knife out of his inner jacket pocket; it is a switchblade with a blade eight centimeters long. He walks over to the window, shuffling down. He gets under the balcony, keeping his gaze fixed on the window, and leaps up, laying his stomach on the marble slab at the base of the window and holding onto it with his left hand, while his right hand guides the tip of the knife into the throat of the girl, bent over on her knees on the toilet. The knife escapes from the girl's neck as quickly as it entered. He, hovering over the window, smiles with his mouth wide open as he watches the girl bring her hands to her neck and emit a gasp of green vomit that coats her legs. She turns sharply and runs, but caroms against the sink, slamming her head on the mirror, sending the latter shattering and the former shattering against the floor. Slumping heavily on the broken shards, with one hand at her throat and the other outstretched toward the door, the girl falls unconscious as blood spurts out of her throat. He pushes himself out the window and walks away toward the van.

The next day an article appears in the newspaper about a girl involved in a domestic accident-she died by slipping in the bathroom while drunk. 

"That's not true! I did it! I did it! I did it! They have to stop me, they have to come and kill me! Whoever wrote this will pay!"

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