“You don’t. You choose cruelty.”
Smash.
“You choose pain and waste.”
Smash.
“You choose selfishness and ego.”
Smash.
“And I choose the same for you.”
Two more times, I bring down the tool on both his ankles. His screams lose themselves somewhere in the background, where I don’t really give a shit about them anymore.
That pain in his expression, the violent twitch of his body as his nerves and heart acknowledge and try to live through it, has me transfixed.
“Then you had to come back from your bloody safaris and hurt animals here.” I shake my head. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Lion cubs are not pets, motherfucker. And they’re certainly not fucking punching bags. I know what you’ve done. I’ve seen the mangled little bodies. I’ve seen the photos you took as fucking trophies. I saw your smile as you held that poor soul. I wretched and vomited through it all, but I still looked. I looked because I had to feel that horror in the pit of my soul and decide what punishment is the most appropriate for you.” One deep breath later, I say the next words with a wide grin on my lips. “Well, I have decided, darling. And I still don’t think the punishment fits the crime.”
He opens his mouth, attempting to form words, but somewhere before my eyes, red seeps in, emotions spiking with the thought of the other reason I’m here. The man I would love to do this to too. The emotional pain he causes me. The fucking heartache as he threatens my parents. The absolute rage at the audacity to cheat on me with my best friend and then refuse the divorce. All of it blows into me all at once, and when I smash that sledgehammer into Cohen’s shoulder, the wail that rips out of him is so loud, so visceral, so charged and guttural, it makes me pause. Not stop completely, but admire.
There it is...that splendid moment when humanity is gone and all that’s left is a meat-sack of pure agony. I harness it carefully, storing all the small reactions in my imaginary filing cabinet.
Maybe I should write a horror novel someday. I will have a detailed list of physical reactions to pain and fear to choose from—no need to scour the internet for examples.
But my rage is not gone yet.
The moment to admire is over.
Mad shrieks, erratic swings of the heavy mallet, unhinged movements come together in a dance of violence. I smash joints first, then the big bones. Before I bring the mallet down on his sternum, I hold his crumpling gaze for enough time that the death skirting his eyes imprints in my mind. That defeat. The fear. The hope for the end of pain. A heady, addictive mix.
Then I crush him.
Ribs snap and pierce his organs, a soundless scream catches in his throat, and finally, the blood comes. He coughs it out in thick ribbons, and as I watch death clouding his eyes, thicker and thicker, my rage dying with him, my chest lighter, I still think this man hasn’t suffered enough.
There’s a special place in hell for people who abuse animals. And since I need an outlet for my explosive rage, years back, I made it my mission to send them all there.
* * *
“Are you okay, Scar?” my brother cocks his head in that annoying, concerned way. He pushes the wooden box holding Cohen’s body into the cremator, feeding him to the fire.
The asshole wasn’t a big man, so in about three hours at around fourteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, he will be ash. Whatever remains, goes in the cremulator, and soon we’ll have nothing but dust. I’ll sprinkle it on the fucking highway. He doesn’t deserve torestanywhere else.
“Marc, you know I’m always good after.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean. The whole ex-refusing-to-be-an-ex thing.” He starts inspecting the space carefully, probably looking for evidence we might have accidentally dropped.
This cremation room is used for burning, so it should be clean. I do my business downstairs, deep in the crematorium’s labyrinth of a storage cellar. My brother’s business offers privacy since he doesn’t work for funerals, but medical waste, decommissioned science donations, finished body farm experiments, and other strange purposes.
But it’s not the only reason I like it; half of that cellar isn’t in the official plans. That includes the escape tunnel built in mymurderroom. Hopefully there will never be a need for it, but its existence greatly calms me.
“Please don’t remind me of him. He’s the reason I’m here now,” I say.
“I know you don’t like it, but I need to know. Did he hurt you? You’re my sister, Scar. You know I’d do anything for you.”
“And I appreciate that. I love you for it. But don’t worry, Bernard will pay eventually. I just have to be smart about it. Plan. And no, he did not hurt me,” I reassure him.
Only, his gaze flickers to my exposed wrist that has caught a bit of color since my bitch of an ex grabbed me too hard.
