John the Murderer

Humans need conflict, thought John, as he dug his first and only grave. John was weak; dainty, sickly and pale, and although he had read about it in books and seen it in movies, he didn’t expect digging a shallow grave to be this difficult.

 

To dig a good grave you need to go at least six feet into the ground, about the length of John’s shovel, plus half again, and about two and a half feet across, to make sure, even if you have a fat f****r, that he’s going to stay in the ground.

 

Alex Carmody, an obese dental hygienist from Rochester, was to fill this hole. “Three feet wide,” John thought. “I better make it three feet wide for this fat f****r.”

 

Now, while John was never interested in murder, he certainly was titillated by it. He liked nothing more than sitting down after a day looking at numbers, turning on the television and seeing the mutilated body of a prostitute or garbage man or cleaner being fisher out of the east river. He knew the eat river because he lived there when he was young, although, he never dumped anyone in it.

 

The cleanliness of murder appealed to him too �" John was a neat freak; no mess could evade his tenacious, introverted germ subjugation, and the idea of cleaning up a murder scene, with the blood stains and sanitized carpet and stench of primal madness all seemed very appealing to him. At least from an objective perspective. John liked to rhyme too.

 

“Where you at, Chesure Cat?” he would text his wife, hours before she came home looking at her shoes and stinking of a dentist office.

 

“Where you been, string bean?” he would call out to her manic, frantic search for Febreeze or ALeo Vera, or something to make herself feel like a wife again.

 

Then she would come in, covered in Febreeze, with her eyes at her shoes and her bag in her hands and her bra strap sticking out of her top and he would look up from prostitutes being cremated and ask her:

 

“What’s with the glare, Fred Estair?” John liked to rhyme.

 

 There was often something wrong with the way that John worked. It was an office with fake plants and fake air and fake people with fake hair. It smelled worse than a crime scene, he imagined. He would hold a mouse in one hand and a coffee in the other and do things that he couldn’t understand, the results of which he never saw. The mouse was a similar size to the rock he used to bludgeon Alex Carmody with.

 

But who cares about him, he’s dead and he’s fat and we don’t like him anyway. He though that he was probably less important than a dental hygienist.

 

His desk was immaculate. Did you know that keyboards and smart phones carry one thousand time the germs than do subway poles or even the doorknob to your house. Think about it, how often to you clean your doorknob? How often do you clean your keyboard? How long to you have to scrub to get blood out of the backseat of a 2007 Subaru Outback? John knows the answer to all of those questions.

 

He knows that bacterial supplements and disinfectant is what keeps him alive, and that he can dig into the cold earth of Spring Connecticut for about twenty minutes before his asthma starts to become a problem. It took him ninety minutes to bury the f****r.

 

His wife asked him about his blisters the next day, he said he went to the driving range. Then she said she was sorry and that she was going out. He asked where and she said Rochester and he smiled.

 

The day before he dug his hole he thought about killing all day at work. Facebook lead him to his victim, thank you technology, and a check-in lead him to his location. If you think about it critically, Facebook has made murder so much easier. John thought about that innocently and thought maybe after al of this he could become a private detective or hit man.

 

Then he thought he hadn’t yet watch enough hit man movies and said he would do that as soon as he got back from Connecticut. Back from the asthma, and the police and that f****r.

 

He thought that killing someone was just like cleaning someone’s teeth �" if you approached it with care and foresight, with the right disinfectant and tools, it would all be over quickly and he could be cleaning the crime scene before he knew it. This made him happy more than anything.

 

John’s job wasn’t hard �" he sold pharmaceutical cleaning products to big companies that had warehouses and jets and all the things that John wish he did, but instead worked for the company whose logo he saw most often in his small apartment when he was young.

 

He met his wife there too �" she was a full-lipped, thin, brunette with long, matted hair. She always wore too things: a scarf given to her by her mother who died of gangrene and a big coat, even in the summer. John often thought she used it to cover her neurosis, but to be honest, be didn’t think about it too often.

 

You should have seen their house, I’ve never seen such a clean place. It was like a brand new oven, or a hospital that’s just been cleaned or the eyes of a dental hygienist. Just perfect, immense and clinical.

 

The bar he met Alex Carmody in was called The Levee. It was a Texan themed dive bar that miserable people collated in to feel like they weren’t living in Rochester anymore. Alex Carmody was there with his perfect teeth and oversized waist, hanging elegantly over a belt that had RoundRock, Austin, written on the front. John didn’t know where RoundRock was, but he was sure it was where b******s who steal people’s wives came from.

 

He handled himself carefully, for how much he weighed, he didn’t lumber around the way fat people usually do, he moved deliberately and purposefully. He hopped on and off the bar stool like a seasoned alcoholic. He pissed more than most people.

 

John approached the bar to buy a beer for the man who was f*****g his wife. He saw the dead prostitute. He saw the police department hauling a hobo out of the east river. He saw that rock in his right hand.

 

“What’s your drink, Professor Frink?”

 

“What?”

 

“Can I buy you a beer?” Not everyone likes rhymes, though John.

 

“Uh, yeah, Rolling Rock,” he said.

 

“Two please, lemon squeeze.”

 

The bartender wince and meandered off to fetch their beers. John could smell the disinfestations on his shirt. It was bitter-sweet.

 

“Thanks buddy,” said the pituitary home wrecker. Lord, how we hate him.

 

“What do you do?” asked John, politely.

 

“Work at a dentist just down the road. It’s okay, pays the bills and keeps me out of trouble. People are nice there, too, real nice, not like back home.”

 

“Where’s home?” John asked.

 

“El Paso, Texas, right there on the boarder. Yep, home’s not what it used to be down there, soon as I get enough money together I’ll bring my parents here too. Might move to Iowa or something.”

 

“Wonderful,” said John, and meant it. He liked people who talked about their parents.

 

“Gimme a second, would you?”

 

“No problemo, Marlon Brando.” It was a weak one, but John didn’t care.

 

Alex Carmody picked himself off the seat, elegantly despite his girth, and waddled on over to the toilet. John put a disinfectant in his beer. An odorless, tasteless, listless disinfectant.

 

John went back to his car in anticipation, and waited for his lumbering prey to get behind the wheel. Hopefully he would crash, he though. No. Then I would have no chance to clean up the crime scene, then what would be the fun?

*****************

 

His wife came home, smelling the same and she did before, with the same Febreeze aroma, same sterile . She told him about the dentists she was sleeping with, that he was a married man too, and that she swore she would never contact Jeremy again.  Not ever. She smelled like Febreeze and disinfectant.

 

John released his wife so she could go shower. He realized that not disinfectant would ever clean up this mess. John lugubriously picked up the remote, switched on the television and smiled.

 

A dead drifter was being pulled out of the Hudson River.

Reviews

[Steve]

Cool read. There are a few grammatical and spelling errors (ie."wore too things), but nothing that cannot be fixed. In terms of characters, loved Jeremy and the way you described him. I would ease up a bit on the usage of "f****r," maybe just use it one or two times to give it more of a punch, which is what expletives really should do in a story. But overall I definitely enjoyed the story...one more thing (sorry if I'm coming off a bit harsh, but it's because I actually enjoyed the story and I'm writing one similar to it now), I would be careful of some of your word usage. Like, for example, you use the word collate to describe the people gathering at a bar...not a bad word, and since you're trying to get the point across that he's into medical jargon and anti-bacterial phraseology, I get it, but sometimes it's better just to use a simpler word, I don't know that's just my opinion. Whoo, okay I'm done. Nice job.