Fanfiction Delight
Look at that. I have written T-Bag fanfiction… yeah, first time doing so, so I have no idea if I got him characterized right, but whatever, I tried.
Title:Faces
Rating:R
Summary:Of course, after Teddy got out of that little juvenile detention centre, everybody hated him a lot more.
WARNINGS:Allusions to child abuse, allusions to rape, violence, gore, swearing, animal abuse.
DisclaimerJust playing with someone else's toys.
Faces
Of course, after Teddy got out of that little juvenile detention centre, everybody hated him a lot more. It surprised him almost. It had been bad before, but it was a million times worse once he left.
That was part of what made it a game.
He wanted to see how hard he could push it. How much he could get away with before they sent him back there again. And he wanted to do worse than all the boys there that beat on him and told him he was worthless because they’d done lots of things worse than he had.
So he resolved to keep getting worse.
It wasn’t even hard really. He liked being incarcerated. He liked that word too. Incarcerated. It sounded strong and angry and diabolical. He liked a lot of words like that and he’d drawl them around at the girls at school but all they’d do was call him a freak and laugh at him and send their little boyfriends to throw him against the wall just to make sure he knew what a piece of shit he was.
Oh, he knew. He liked to picture all those pretty little girls with their necks snapped and bleeding out from their eye sockets. When he got bored in class he’d draw little pictures of them dying. He drew Rebecca with her strawberry-blonde hair and little cackle hanging from the gallows like a criminal and he taped it up on the wall in the hallway and smirked a little bit from a dark corner while watching her shriek and even cry a little bit when she saw it.
She went running home to mommy and daddy because big, bad Teddy drew a scary drawing.
He liked the feeling that he’d made her feel like how they all made him feel.
So, after that he just kept going. He drew a picture of Miranda, that dark-haired girl with big eyes that spread her legs for everyone but him, naked and stabbed a thousand times in the chest and in the face until it didn’t even look like her anymore and he slipped in her backpack when she wasn’t looking which was easy because he sat behind her in class and would sometimes lean forwards and smell the back of her neck when no one was looking.
She didn’t come to school the next day and when she did she looked all pale and blotchy and didn’t make eye contact with anyone all day. He hissed laughter under his breath all through class and watched her stiffen up whenever he breathed in.
There was a girl named Hannah with curly hair and freckles and a few days after Miranda came back to school she made her boyfriend punch Teddy in the face.
He went home and spat blood on a piece of paper and drew Hannah bleeding out from her eyes and he put it in her desk and watched her turn pale when she found it. He giggled a little bit at the look on her face.
Oh, she thought she was such a brave, brave little kitty but deep down she was just like everybody else.
In art class the teacher said that he could draw better than any of the other students, even though is pictures were morbid. That was the word his art teacher liked to use for him. Morbid. He really liked that word a lot and he’d throw it around quite a bit until some of the other boys made him shut up.
“Why don’t you try drawing something more whimsical?” His art teacher said in this sort of tone that he couldn’t figure out. “You’ve got such talent, Theodore. Don’t waste it.”
That was the same night that his mama freaked out and had to be sent to the hospital because she wouldn’t stop screaming. He stayed up and drew a picture of her tied up and gagged and bleeding to death and felt better about everything.
There was one girl in his class that didn’t pick on him and that was Mona. She was bony in some places and fat in others with hair that was never washed right and acne like he had. Her daddy did things to her and got sent to prison, but that didn’t do much because he got off on all charges and kept doing it and no one bothered to turn him in because he was dirt poor and no one liked Mona very much anyways.
Sometimes Mona would sit with him at lunch and watch him draw his little pictures of Rebecca and Miranda and Hannah and the rest of the girls, and Mona never ratted him out because she hated them all just as much as he did.
“You ever draw a drownin’ person?” Mona asked one time.
“No. Can’t get the water right.” Was all he replied and he kept drawing and she didn’t say anything else because she was a quiet sort of person in general.
His dad liked to sing a lot back then. He’d walk around the house just crooning something or another that he’d heard that day and Teddy learned to read from the song what sort of mood they were all in for in a particular day. Sometimes it would be something mellow and Teddy didn’t have to worry but on some days things would get more nasty and he’d just go out and stare at things.
Drawing blood wasn’t the real thing.
That was why he was morbidly thrilled when he found the body of a squirrel in the middle of the road, just lying there and he went over to see it and it took him a few seconds to realize that its chest was still heaving with life. And he looked at it for a little while, then stood up and brought his foot down on it, smashing it again and again, enthralled by the wrecked body as he listened to bones snapping. He finally stopped after the flesh had torn and blood, guts and things he didn’t have words for were soaking out onto the pavement.
“Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” A man from one of the houses ran at him and he bolted. “I know who you are, Bagwell! Gonna go back to juvie for cruelty to animals, you hear?”
But the man must not have been all that concerned because he didn’t do anything about it.
Teddy sat on the floor in his closet and drew dead squirrels for what might have been hours before he moved on and drew everybody in his class, all of their faces staring hollowly up at him like corpses with their mouths hanging dementedly open. He made Rebecca’s hair frizz out and Miranda’s nose swell and Hannah look like someone had hit her with something heavy. He drew Mona clutching at the neck of her shirt with her lips tightly squeezed together like she was trying to stop herself from screaming. He drew himself standing right in the front with a look on his face that made him shiver to look at.
Then he heard his daddy’s footsteps in the hall and he scratched out all the faces until all he could see was jagged pencil lines and the ghosts of old faces.
At school one day his art teacher was flipping through a lot of his drawings with the sort of look on her face that suggested she was likely to be sick or possibly just a little bit afraid of what she was seeing. The expression made Teddy lick his lips just a little and smirk as her face kept getting paler and paler.
Finally she put it down even though she hadn’t even got halfway through it yet, like she was completely unable to look at any more of her students cut up and dying even if it was only on a piece of paper. When she looked at him she looked wary.
“Theodore, do you think you might be able to draw a picture of me?” She sounded kind of afraid to ask, which almost made him laugh.
“How do you want it?” He wondered if she’d get it, but she always seemed like a smart woman and she was a teacher so she had to be, so she should understand. But he could never tell with some people.
She looked nervous of him for the first time and he wondered what she saw different in the pictures that she used to say were so good if so morbid to make her look at him like that. Really, nothing had changed. “Alive.”
He wasn’t sure she understood art right then.
He did try to draw her because he had nothing against her and she always stopped the boys from beating on him when she caught them at it, but he couldn’t see her alive on paper. He could see her bloated with her eyes shut and her lips slightly parted, cold and dead as though someone had held her underwater for a long time. He even got the water to pearl just right in her hair and on her skin.
Mona saw him drawing it and she smiled a little, which didn’t happen often with her. “See. You can draw people drowned.”
He just shrugged a little bit and the two of them stared at the picture, him just looking for something he couldn’t seem to find and her with her legs drawn up against her chest with her head to one side and her eyebrows all wrinkled as though something that she could see there was making her want to throw up but not in a bad way.
He left the picture on his art teacher’s desk at the beginning of class and sat at his desk, letting a smirk take his face as he watched the way she flinched and tried to resist covering her mouth when she saw it.
She gave them their assignments and left the room, mashing his picture into a ball and throwing it in a trash bin on her way out. He fished it out at the end of class and unfolded it, smoothing out all the creases until he realized that it kind of looked better with the creases there.
He gave it to Mona because he had no use for it and she seemed to like it.
One day a little while after that a bunch of boys caught him and dragged him out back and hit him until he could barely think straight or see straight and midway through his art teacher passed by and this time she didn’t do anything to stop him. When they were finished with him and he was bleeding everywhere he walked past her in the lunch room and spat on her, watching her expression as the blood struck her.
“Thanks for earlier.” He drawled at her and winked, swaggering off somewhere and kicking over a trashcan as he went.
She stopped paying much attention to him at all after that and whenever she caught him looking at her she looked away like just his eyes made her feel all violated. He would snicker at her and lean forwards in his desk leering while everyone huffed and pretended that they didn’t notice.
Dances were stupid and didn’t interest him much but that was mostly because there was never anyone who would go with him, so at the next dance after his art teacher stopped paying attention to his existence he asked Mona to go and she said sure because she didn’t really have anything better to do than go home and get raped by his daddy. Come to think of it, Teddy didn’t either so they were a good match like that.
When Rebecca and Miranda and Hannah found out they all laughed and called Mona ugly and fat and called Teddy stupid and sick and then their boyfriends threw rocks at Teddy until he kicked one of them in the balls hard enough that he couldn’t even breathe.
Teddy laughed the whole way home because it felt damn good to do the beating and he could go for a change like that.
He got home and he drew a pile of slaughtered corpses like sheep or something like that and he put it up on his wall so he just had to cock his head to see it when he felt like it or when he needed to.
At the dance he stood around in a corner while Mona sat in some chair somewhere and watched Rebecca and Miranda and Hannah and their boyfriends dance and blow kisses and wondered what it would be like to be one of them. He considered all the possibilities of death. He could slit their throats or their wrists or stab them or choke them or drown them or burn them or crush them and it would all be the same in the end.
After all, if kicking some guy in the balls could make things better, he could only imagine how much better it would be if one of them actually died.
It was an anticlimax. Anticlimactic. That was the sort of word a person could drool over.
He walked Mona home because that was the sort of thing it seemed like he was supposed to do, only he got sidetracked along the way when he found a rabbit at the side of the road, dead. He couldn’t help stopping to see and Mona stood there silently and watched him. He wanted to skin it or burn it or rip it open or snap its neck or something only it was already dead. He wanted to kill it.
But he couldn’t do that so he just kept walking and Mona trailed along behind him not saying a thing even when he dropped her at her house and left without a word.
He didn’t go straight home, instead he went deeper away from people until he found something alive, just a little bird that had been knocked out of its nest by one thing or another and couldn’t fly yet so it didn’t take much effort to catch it. He held it in his hands for a long moment and felt the flutter of its heartbeat under his fingertips, which was practically orgasmic in a way. He relished in the sound that came when he snapped its neck and the heartbeat stopped. He dropped it on the ground and walked away, heading back home as if nothing at all had happened.
When he got to his room he looked at the picture of the slaughtered people on his wall and scribbled over it until there was just a bunch of scratchy lines and then he could sleep again because he was sure that the dead people weren’t staring.
After that he started drawing clowns a lot with their heads just hanging by a thread of flesh and their eyes popping grotesquely like someone had mutilated them real good and he drew trickles of blood leaking down from their lips and their make-up smeared sordidly. He put them in Rebecca’s bag and watched how she started getting jumpier and jumpier as though someone was going to pop out behind her and tear her heart out and he really wanted to be the one to do it.
One day he was standing outside the girls’ bathroom and she came out looking all pale and shaky and she didn’t see him at first so he slunk up next to her and purred. “Boo.”
She screamed and jumped and pushed him. “Stay away from me you rotten freak!”
“Oh, I’m so scared.” He mocked and she took off away from him like he was some sort of infectious disease or something. It made him laugh to know that he could scare someone that good.
He hadn’t even done anything to her; not really.
Mona and he went out one day just walking and he spotted a little squirrel scurrying around and licked his lips because just then he really wanted to do something nice. Blood and guts and bones snapping in a million places sounded fine with him. “You wanna see me kill that?” He asked Mona, cocking his head just a little bit at the squirrel and not taking his eyes off it for a minute like a real predator was supposed to do.
She was quiet for a second. “Yeah.” She finally said and that was all the encouragement he needed really.
It took him a long time to actually catch it but he was pretty good at slinking up behind things and catching them unaware and he was even better at making things think that it would all be fine. Only after a few scratches the squirrel settled down a little in his hands and he just licked his lips and stared at it. “Want me to snap its neck?” Mona didn’t say anything so he just did. The crack made a little thrill run through him like with that bird and that squirrel before except better for some reason or another. He felt the death in it and he dropped it on the ground, toeing it a little with his foot. “No blood that way.” He remarked just to make conversation because Mona never did and he liked to hear himself talk sometimes. “Just gettin’ straight to the point like that.”
“You ever done that before?” Mona asked after a second and her voice didn’t have any emotion in it because it never did really. Too many nights laying up terrified that her big bad daddy would sneak into her room and touch her in ways that would leave her crying and shaking and feeling like she wanted to die.
“Once.” He licked his lips a bit and smirked at her, but she wasn’t looking at him she was just staring down at the dead squirrel. “We could gut it. Let it bleed out everywhere and wait for somethin’ to come eat it.”
She shrugged a little bit and didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need her to say anything because she wasn’t really all that important to him anyway. “Next time I’ll cut it open and gouge out its eyes and watch it die like that.”
Mona liked watching him do it, but she never participated at all herself. They would sneak off sometimes and catch something small and fuzzy and shove a knife through its gut and tear out whatever was inside or push a pencil through its eye or snap its bones and listen to it scream and squirm and die. It was nicer than drawing it. It was like living it.
There was this dog on Teddy’s street that never shut up. It was a beautiful creature with this long fur the colour of Rebecca’s hair and sometimes he’d throw things at it just to get it nice and baited and to make its owner shout threats at him that they never went through with. It wasn’t all that hard to get the dog away from the house, following him out towards where all the decaying bodies were kept. Mona told him to bury them but he liked the smell of them rotting.
Mona looked sort of unsettled when she saw him holding the dog. “Are you really gonna kill it?”
He popped out a little razor that he stole from his daddy that morning when he was busy with his mama. “Why not?” The dog trusted him well enough so he managed to hold it between his legs and then hold its head with his arm while he slid the blade through its side, dragging it along and feeling the blood squish out onto his hands while the dog writhed and tried to bite him and made sounds that no animal made unless it was being gutted like this.
He tightened his grip on its neck until the ultimate snap and then it slumped down on the ground. He pushed the blade firmly into its eye and shuddered at the sound and the smell and the feeling of blood on his hands.
He pulled back and wiped his mouth, leaving a little smear of blood there and he laughed while holding the razor and looking down at the little doggy. “Ain’t gonna bark at me again.”
Mona looked almost like she was going to be sick or like she was going to laugh. It didn’t seem like she could decide what to do.
“You know, we could do this to people.” He said, looking at her intently to see what her reaction would be. If she would be scared and run or if she would want this as badly as he wanted it. “Lead them away from the pack. Slash their little throats and watch them beg for us to end it and then just kill them.”
She didn’t say anything for a long, long time, just looked at him with a kind of horror that made him feel dirty in a bad way. “You’re sick.” She turned as if to walk away but he had always been faster than her and he jetted out his hand and grabbed her, yanking her back.
“I’m sick? Look me in the eye, kitty, and tell me you weren’t pretendin’ that all these little things weren’t your daddy when I gutted ‘em.” He challenged her to say it and knew the moment the words were out of his mouth that she wouldn’t.
“You’re a freak!” She pulled away again like all the little animals did when they finally realized what he was going to do to them. “I’m gonna tell everybody what you’ve been doin’. They’re gonna send you back to jail for all this. You’re such a freak, stay the fuck away from me!”
“Gone too far now, kitty.” He pulled her in close so that their breath mixed together when they exhaled and he could smell the fear and the shock and the loathing emanating from her right then. “You’re gonna start something you can’t finish.”
It was too easy to do. All it was really was a motion of moving the razor across her throat hard and fast and then shoving her back with enough force that she ended up on her back on the ground too shocked to scream and in too much pain to do anything else. She clutched at her throat and tried to stop the bleeding with her hands even though nothing was gonna stop it now.
Her lying there like that was like a present just too much to resist.
He yanked her pants down and did to her like her daddy did and his daddy did and she still couldn’t make a sound, but that didn’t surprise him because after enough times of it you just stopped being able to feel it at all. And when he got up off of her he almost wanted to let her live just to see what she would do then, but he knew there was no point. Gone too far now. Can’t go back. He stabbed her thirty-seven times in the chest and scratched out her face like he would a picture.
When his mama saw him when he got home she just looked away from all the blood. He got into the shower and washed himself twelve times until the water was cold and he was bleeding in some places and for some reason it all felt better than anything else in the world.
He sat up that night drawing picture after picture of Mona alive, Mona dying, Mona dead, Mona staring, Mona running, Mona drowning, Mona hiding, Mona crying and he scratched out her faces, counting the seconds until someone found her lying there surrounded by dead squirrels and rabbits and birds and one dead dog. Counting the minutes until someone said that he might have done it. Counting the hours until he’d be back in prison. Counting the days until he’d be able to think about anything else. Counting the weeks until he’d do it again just because he could and just because it felt damn good.
He scratched out Mona’s face in another drawing and started again.
Title:Faces
Rating:R
Summary:Of course, after Teddy got out of that little juvenile detention centre, everybody hated him a lot more.
WARNINGS:Allusions to child abuse, allusions to rape, violence, gore, swearing, animal abuse.
DisclaimerJust playing with someone else's toys.
Faces
Of course, after Teddy got out of that little juvenile detention centre, everybody hated him a lot more. It surprised him almost. It had been bad before, but it was a million times worse once he left.
That was part of what made it a game.
He wanted to see how hard he could push it. How much he could get away with before they sent him back there again. And he wanted to do worse than all the boys there that beat on him and told him he was worthless because they’d done lots of things worse than he had.
So he resolved to keep getting worse.
It wasn’t even hard really. He liked being incarcerated. He liked that word too. Incarcerated. It sounded strong and angry and diabolical. He liked a lot of words like that and he’d drawl them around at the girls at school but all they’d do was call him a freak and laugh at him and send their little boyfriends to throw him against the wall just to make sure he knew what a piece of shit he was.
Oh, he knew. He liked to picture all those pretty little girls with their necks snapped and bleeding out from their eye sockets. When he got bored in class he’d draw little pictures of them dying. He drew Rebecca with her strawberry-blonde hair and little cackle hanging from the gallows like a criminal and he taped it up on the wall in the hallway and smirked a little bit from a dark corner while watching her shriek and even cry a little bit when she saw it.
She went running home to mommy and daddy because big, bad Teddy drew a scary drawing.
He liked the feeling that he’d made her feel like how they all made him feel.
So, after that he just kept going. He drew a picture of Miranda, that dark-haired girl with big eyes that spread her legs for everyone but him, naked and stabbed a thousand times in the chest and in the face until it didn’t even look like her anymore and he slipped in her backpack when she wasn’t looking which was easy because he sat behind her in class and would sometimes lean forwards and smell the back of her neck when no one was looking.
She didn’t come to school the next day and when she did she looked all pale and blotchy and didn’t make eye contact with anyone all day. He hissed laughter under his breath all through class and watched her stiffen up whenever he breathed in.
There was a girl named Hannah with curly hair and freckles and a few days after Miranda came back to school she made her boyfriend punch Teddy in the face.
He went home and spat blood on a piece of paper and drew Hannah bleeding out from her eyes and he put it in her desk and watched her turn pale when she found it. He giggled a little bit at the look on her face.
Oh, she thought she was such a brave, brave little kitty but deep down she was just like everybody else.
In art class the teacher said that he could draw better than any of the other students, even though is pictures were morbid. That was the word his art teacher liked to use for him. Morbid. He really liked that word a lot and he’d throw it around quite a bit until some of the other boys made him shut up.
“Why don’t you try drawing something more whimsical?” His art teacher said in this sort of tone that he couldn’t figure out. “You’ve got such talent, Theodore. Don’t waste it.”
That was the same night that his mama freaked out and had to be sent to the hospital because she wouldn’t stop screaming. He stayed up and drew a picture of her tied up and gagged and bleeding to death and felt better about everything.
There was one girl in his class that didn’t pick on him and that was Mona. She was bony in some places and fat in others with hair that was never washed right and acne like he had. Her daddy did things to her and got sent to prison, but that didn’t do much because he got off on all charges and kept doing it and no one bothered to turn him in because he was dirt poor and no one liked Mona very much anyways.
Sometimes Mona would sit with him at lunch and watch him draw his little pictures of Rebecca and Miranda and Hannah and the rest of the girls, and Mona never ratted him out because she hated them all just as much as he did.
“You ever draw a drownin’ person?” Mona asked one time.
“No. Can’t get the water right.” Was all he replied and he kept drawing and she didn’t say anything else because she was a quiet sort of person in general.
His dad liked to sing a lot back then. He’d walk around the house just crooning something or another that he’d heard that day and Teddy learned to read from the song what sort of mood they were all in for in a particular day. Sometimes it would be something mellow and Teddy didn’t have to worry but on some days things would get more nasty and he’d just go out and stare at things.
Drawing blood wasn’t the real thing.
That was why he was morbidly thrilled when he found the body of a squirrel in the middle of the road, just lying there and he went over to see it and it took him a few seconds to realize that its chest was still heaving with life. And he looked at it for a little while, then stood up and brought his foot down on it, smashing it again and again, enthralled by the wrecked body as he listened to bones snapping. He finally stopped after the flesh had torn and blood, guts and things he didn’t have words for were soaking out onto the pavement.
“Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” A man from one of the houses ran at him and he bolted. “I know who you are, Bagwell! Gonna go back to juvie for cruelty to animals, you hear?”
But the man must not have been all that concerned because he didn’t do anything about it.
Teddy sat on the floor in his closet and drew dead squirrels for what might have been hours before he moved on and drew everybody in his class, all of their faces staring hollowly up at him like corpses with their mouths hanging dementedly open. He made Rebecca’s hair frizz out and Miranda’s nose swell and Hannah look like someone had hit her with something heavy. He drew Mona clutching at the neck of her shirt with her lips tightly squeezed together like she was trying to stop herself from screaming. He drew himself standing right in the front with a look on his face that made him shiver to look at.
Then he heard his daddy’s footsteps in the hall and he scratched out all the faces until all he could see was jagged pencil lines and the ghosts of old faces.
At school one day his art teacher was flipping through a lot of his drawings with the sort of look on her face that suggested she was likely to be sick or possibly just a little bit afraid of what she was seeing. The expression made Teddy lick his lips just a little and smirk as her face kept getting paler and paler.
Finally she put it down even though she hadn’t even got halfway through it yet, like she was completely unable to look at any more of her students cut up and dying even if it was only on a piece of paper. When she looked at him she looked wary.
“Theodore, do you think you might be able to draw a picture of me?” She sounded kind of afraid to ask, which almost made him laugh.
“How do you want it?” He wondered if she’d get it, but she always seemed like a smart woman and she was a teacher so she had to be, so she should understand. But he could never tell with some people.
She looked nervous of him for the first time and he wondered what she saw different in the pictures that she used to say were so good if so morbid to make her look at him like that. Really, nothing had changed. “Alive.”
He wasn’t sure she understood art right then.
He did try to draw her because he had nothing against her and she always stopped the boys from beating on him when she caught them at it, but he couldn’t see her alive on paper. He could see her bloated with her eyes shut and her lips slightly parted, cold and dead as though someone had held her underwater for a long time. He even got the water to pearl just right in her hair and on her skin.
Mona saw him drawing it and she smiled a little, which didn’t happen often with her. “See. You can draw people drowned.”
He just shrugged a little bit and the two of them stared at the picture, him just looking for something he couldn’t seem to find and her with her legs drawn up against her chest with her head to one side and her eyebrows all wrinkled as though something that she could see there was making her want to throw up but not in a bad way.
He left the picture on his art teacher’s desk at the beginning of class and sat at his desk, letting a smirk take his face as he watched the way she flinched and tried to resist covering her mouth when she saw it.
She gave them their assignments and left the room, mashing his picture into a ball and throwing it in a trash bin on her way out. He fished it out at the end of class and unfolded it, smoothing out all the creases until he realized that it kind of looked better with the creases there.
He gave it to Mona because he had no use for it and she seemed to like it.
One day a little while after that a bunch of boys caught him and dragged him out back and hit him until he could barely think straight or see straight and midway through his art teacher passed by and this time she didn’t do anything to stop him. When they were finished with him and he was bleeding everywhere he walked past her in the lunch room and spat on her, watching her expression as the blood struck her.
“Thanks for earlier.” He drawled at her and winked, swaggering off somewhere and kicking over a trashcan as he went.
She stopped paying much attention to him at all after that and whenever she caught him looking at her she looked away like just his eyes made her feel all violated. He would snicker at her and lean forwards in his desk leering while everyone huffed and pretended that they didn’t notice.
Dances were stupid and didn’t interest him much but that was mostly because there was never anyone who would go with him, so at the next dance after his art teacher stopped paying attention to his existence he asked Mona to go and she said sure because she didn’t really have anything better to do than go home and get raped by his daddy. Come to think of it, Teddy didn’t either so they were a good match like that.
When Rebecca and Miranda and Hannah found out they all laughed and called Mona ugly and fat and called Teddy stupid and sick and then their boyfriends threw rocks at Teddy until he kicked one of them in the balls hard enough that he couldn’t even breathe.
Teddy laughed the whole way home because it felt damn good to do the beating and he could go for a change like that.
He got home and he drew a pile of slaughtered corpses like sheep or something like that and he put it up on his wall so he just had to cock his head to see it when he felt like it or when he needed to.
At the dance he stood around in a corner while Mona sat in some chair somewhere and watched Rebecca and Miranda and Hannah and their boyfriends dance and blow kisses and wondered what it would be like to be one of them. He considered all the possibilities of death. He could slit their throats or their wrists or stab them or choke them or drown them or burn them or crush them and it would all be the same in the end.
After all, if kicking some guy in the balls could make things better, he could only imagine how much better it would be if one of them actually died.
It was an anticlimax. Anticlimactic. That was the sort of word a person could drool over.
He walked Mona home because that was the sort of thing it seemed like he was supposed to do, only he got sidetracked along the way when he found a rabbit at the side of the road, dead. He couldn’t help stopping to see and Mona stood there silently and watched him. He wanted to skin it or burn it or rip it open or snap its neck or something only it was already dead. He wanted to kill it.
But he couldn’t do that so he just kept walking and Mona trailed along behind him not saying a thing even when he dropped her at her house and left without a word.
He didn’t go straight home, instead he went deeper away from people until he found something alive, just a little bird that had been knocked out of its nest by one thing or another and couldn’t fly yet so it didn’t take much effort to catch it. He held it in his hands for a long moment and felt the flutter of its heartbeat under his fingertips, which was practically orgasmic in a way. He relished in the sound that came when he snapped its neck and the heartbeat stopped. He dropped it on the ground and walked away, heading back home as if nothing at all had happened.
When he got to his room he looked at the picture of the slaughtered people on his wall and scribbled over it until there was just a bunch of scratchy lines and then he could sleep again because he was sure that the dead people weren’t staring.
After that he started drawing clowns a lot with their heads just hanging by a thread of flesh and their eyes popping grotesquely like someone had mutilated them real good and he drew trickles of blood leaking down from their lips and their make-up smeared sordidly. He put them in Rebecca’s bag and watched how she started getting jumpier and jumpier as though someone was going to pop out behind her and tear her heart out and he really wanted to be the one to do it.
One day he was standing outside the girls’ bathroom and she came out looking all pale and shaky and she didn’t see him at first so he slunk up next to her and purred. “Boo.”
She screamed and jumped and pushed him. “Stay away from me you rotten freak!”
“Oh, I’m so scared.” He mocked and she took off away from him like he was some sort of infectious disease or something. It made him laugh to know that he could scare someone that good.
He hadn’t even done anything to her; not really.
Mona and he went out one day just walking and he spotted a little squirrel scurrying around and licked his lips because just then he really wanted to do something nice. Blood and guts and bones snapping in a million places sounded fine with him. “You wanna see me kill that?” He asked Mona, cocking his head just a little bit at the squirrel and not taking his eyes off it for a minute like a real predator was supposed to do.
She was quiet for a second. “Yeah.” She finally said and that was all the encouragement he needed really.
It took him a long time to actually catch it but he was pretty good at slinking up behind things and catching them unaware and he was even better at making things think that it would all be fine. Only after a few scratches the squirrel settled down a little in his hands and he just licked his lips and stared at it. “Want me to snap its neck?” Mona didn’t say anything so he just did. The crack made a little thrill run through him like with that bird and that squirrel before except better for some reason or another. He felt the death in it and he dropped it on the ground, toeing it a little with his foot. “No blood that way.” He remarked just to make conversation because Mona never did and he liked to hear himself talk sometimes. “Just gettin’ straight to the point like that.”
“You ever done that before?” Mona asked after a second and her voice didn’t have any emotion in it because it never did really. Too many nights laying up terrified that her big bad daddy would sneak into her room and touch her in ways that would leave her crying and shaking and feeling like she wanted to die.
“Once.” He licked his lips a bit and smirked at her, but she wasn’t looking at him she was just staring down at the dead squirrel. “We could gut it. Let it bleed out everywhere and wait for somethin’ to come eat it.”
She shrugged a little bit and didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need her to say anything because she wasn’t really all that important to him anyway. “Next time I’ll cut it open and gouge out its eyes and watch it die like that.”
Mona liked watching him do it, but she never participated at all herself. They would sneak off sometimes and catch something small and fuzzy and shove a knife through its gut and tear out whatever was inside or push a pencil through its eye or snap its bones and listen to it scream and squirm and die. It was nicer than drawing it. It was like living it.
There was this dog on Teddy’s street that never shut up. It was a beautiful creature with this long fur the colour of Rebecca’s hair and sometimes he’d throw things at it just to get it nice and baited and to make its owner shout threats at him that they never went through with. It wasn’t all that hard to get the dog away from the house, following him out towards where all the decaying bodies were kept. Mona told him to bury them but he liked the smell of them rotting.
Mona looked sort of unsettled when she saw him holding the dog. “Are you really gonna kill it?”
He popped out a little razor that he stole from his daddy that morning when he was busy with his mama. “Why not?” The dog trusted him well enough so he managed to hold it between his legs and then hold its head with his arm while he slid the blade through its side, dragging it along and feeling the blood squish out onto his hands while the dog writhed and tried to bite him and made sounds that no animal made unless it was being gutted like this.
He tightened his grip on its neck until the ultimate snap and then it slumped down on the ground. He pushed the blade firmly into its eye and shuddered at the sound and the smell and the feeling of blood on his hands.
He pulled back and wiped his mouth, leaving a little smear of blood there and he laughed while holding the razor and looking down at the little doggy. “Ain’t gonna bark at me again.”
Mona looked almost like she was going to be sick or like she was going to laugh. It didn’t seem like she could decide what to do.
“You know, we could do this to people.” He said, looking at her intently to see what her reaction would be. If she would be scared and run or if she would want this as badly as he wanted it. “Lead them away from the pack. Slash their little throats and watch them beg for us to end it and then just kill them.”
She didn’t say anything for a long, long time, just looked at him with a kind of horror that made him feel dirty in a bad way. “You’re sick.” She turned as if to walk away but he had always been faster than her and he jetted out his hand and grabbed her, yanking her back.
“I’m sick? Look me in the eye, kitty, and tell me you weren’t pretendin’ that all these little things weren’t your daddy when I gutted ‘em.” He challenged her to say it and knew the moment the words were out of his mouth that she wouldn’t.
“You’re a freak!” She pulled away again like all the little animals did when they finally realized what he was going to do to them. “I’m gonna tell everybody what you’ve been doin’. They’re gonna send you back to jail for all this. You’re such a freak, stay the fuck away from me!”
“Gone too far now, kitty.” He pulled her in close so that their breath mixed together when they exhaled and he could smell the fear and the shock and the loathing emanating from her right then. “You’re gonna start something you can’t finish.”
It was too easy to do. All it was really was a motion of moving the razor across her throat hard and fast and then shoving her back with enough force that she ended up on her back on the ground too shocked to scream and in too much pain to do anything else. She clutched at her throat and tried to stop the bleeding with her hands even though nothing was gonna stop it now.
Her lying there like that was like a present just too much to resist.
He yanked her pants down and did to her like her daddy did and his daddy did and she still couldn’t make a sound, but that didn’t surprise him because after enough times of it you just stopped being able to feel it at all. And when he got up off of her he almost wanted to let her live just to see what she would do then, but he knew there was no point. Gone too far now. Can’t go back. He stabbed her thirty-seven times in the chest and scratched out her face like he would a picture.
When his mama saw him when he got home she just looked away from all the blood. He got into the shower and washed himself twelve times until the water was cold and he was bleeding in some places and for some reason it all felt better than anything else in the world.
He sat up that night drawing picture after picture of Mona alive, Mona dying, Mona dead, Mona staring, Mona running, Mona drowning, Mona hiding, Mona crying and he scratched out her faces, counting the seconds until someone found her lying there surrounded by dead squirrels and rabbits and birds and one dead dog. Counting the minutes until someone said that he might have done it. Counting the hours until he’d be back in prison. Counting the days until he’d be able to think about anything else. Counting the weeks until he’d do it again just because he could and just because it felt damn good.
He scratched out Mona’s face in another drawing and started again.