Stuttering

By

Steven Mangold

It wasn’t glorious. There was a sort of relief, a slight moment where the weight was gone, but a stuttering paranoia filled the vacuum. Simon sort of shook and backed up a little and found the wall and made movement that resembled sitting only in that he remained upright, but was closer to a fall in it’s uncontrolled abruptness.

He stared at the blood and bits on his gun. He accepted something like that, but not the way he was seeing it, detached and separate enough from himself, that his hand and the gun in it, seemed even more real than before.

The only sound now was the ambient noise of a house in the suburbs and the air sucking sound that followed multiple gunshots.

The body on the other side of the room leaned back in an awkward and twisted way. It sat on a chair whose front legs were off the ground, the arms were at it’s side, tied down, but bent with the bunching of the ropes. The chair catching on the wall trimming, gave the back of the body and what was left of the head an appearance of sticking to the wall.

Simon stomach had a pit, filled with the knowledge that the man before him still felt no remorse. He knew the man did not feel his wrath, not the way Simon wanted him to feel it. And no matter what Simon had done, the man would never have felt it. Beyond that, Simon did not receive what he had come for.

He needed to leave soon, in case someone heard, in case the man’s wife or kids came home, he just needed to leave.

He gave himself a few more moments against the wall, alone with his actions. He then began to move and breathe again. Well familiar with the smell of spent gunpowder, unfamiliar with the smell of blasted, scorched flesh and bone, Simon took in the scene one more time, with all his senses. He felt nothing but the same paranoia and the same vacuum, a vacuum beckoning something else.

He noticed his clothes had bits of blood on them too. Of course, much of the kitchen had been scattered with it. He had to change, and search once more, and that was it.

Simon reached into his leather jacket and pulled out the polaroids. They would be a calling card, Simon was certain. The local authorities would recognize those pictures and the person who brought them to their attention. They would know Simon as the man who learned the loopholes and inside deals that made the law thin and empty. They would find the polaroids scattered around the body and see the law made meaningless before them and maybe feel grateful as well. But they would most certainly know it was Simon who left those pictures.

He went up the stairs of the man's house, tried two doors, one was a boy’s bedroom, the other was the parents. The man was roughly Simon’s height and build, even had the same hair color. Simon rummaged for clothes, found a t-shirt, jeans and an old shoebox on the top shelf.

He stripped and washed his hands and face in the bathroom. Wiped down his gun and stared in the mirror at the bags under his eyes.

He pulled on the man’s jeans and shirt, then sat down on the man’s bed, holding the shoebox in his lap.

Simon was not sure whether he would walk to the police station, take a bus there, find whatever way he could to get there, admit what he had done and face the consequences of his self-administered justice. Or whether he would go back to his car, drive far away, leave the car there and keep going. He had the feeling, form the weight of the shoebox, and the sound of when he shook it slightly, that his decision would be based on what he found inside. He knew what his decision would be, and breathed in a sharp long breath through closed teeth. He gave faint thanks that at least he knew to expect what to see when he opened this package.

The polaroids inside were worse than he expected, in their own way, than the polaroids he had thrown down on the kitchen floor. These pictures were blood sex and viscera in various combinations and Simon’s mind took time in processing and categorizing what he saw, working two or three steps behind his fingers as they sifted through the polaroids. He did not vomit, though he felt it, a deeper part of him loosened the vice around his stomach as he viewed the pictures and realized none of the little girls was his daughter.

Simon was swimming in something else now. The man’s wife was in these photos, wearing the same forced smile she wore in the family photograph on the bed stand. A familiar forced smile. He took the ones with her, her husband and the victims, and Simon left them on the bed. The man’s wife was not protected like the husband, and even if she was, these polaroids were worse than simple rape, he didn‘t expect her protection to last long.

He wondered if it was the wife who took the pictures of his little girl.

He left the pictures of the victims and parts of victims on the bed. He left the pictures of the man on the bed. Simon took the pictures of the others, not the man, not the wife, and not the victim. And in a complete show of disregard to order, each picture was labeled, neat and nice on the back.

Simon made mental note that the man’s son was in none of the pictures. But then this was one shoebox, in a house with a basement, spaces under beds, an attic, maybe even crawlspaces and most definitely many more closets.

He made one phone call, alerting the police to a murder. He grabbed more of the man’s clothes from his closet.

He went to the kitchen and put his clothes into a plastic trash bag. He viewed the body, he didn’t see the gaping maw where the face used to be, but the grin of sadism he had memorized from polaroids. Simon took some loose cash from a candy jar on the kitchen table, he took an address book sitting by the kitchen phone, and he tried not to look again at the only photos of his daughter he had possessed since the divorce, scattered on the floor. And he left the house.