Heartbeat

I slit open the envelope and pictures scattered across the floor. I was frozen. My heartbeat was strangely loud in my ears.

Dub-Dub... Dub-Dub... Dub-Dub....

It was a spread of photos, their glossy finish reflecting the light. They were all Her. My Wife.

Pictures of her weeping, crying, yelling, sobbing, shrieking, they seeped across the floor like a macabre painting. Her visage a centerpiece in this work of art.

They were taken recently, judging by her haircut. The part of my brain that wasn't analyzing the pictures was wordless with rage. I thought it was better to ignore that part of my psyche. It did not bode well for my sanity if I didn't.

It was obvious she was being tortured. Brutally, if the abject misery of her expression was anything to go by.

The coherent part of my brain distantly wondered, who would dare to do this? It was at least worth a death sentence. It had to be someone who didn't care for death, maybe someone suicidal, or someone with a personal obsession about her. My blood ran cold, someone like--

My thoughts were interrupted by a pool seeping across the floor.

It was red.

My heart stopped. I could hardly hear my heartbeat anymore, as my ears were blocked out by a strange static. Like a television without signal.

My feet unwittingly drew me towards the kitchen, the origin. The static buzzing around my head had subsided a little, and small facts like my toes were soggy, and I was ruining my socks, and the fact that I was leaving red footprints all over her floor registered over the strange numbness that had encased my thought processes.

The scene was Disturbing. Note the capital. But as I stood standing there dumbstruck, only one sentence penetrated the mound of molasses that was currently filled the interior of my skull.

She was in pieces. Literally.

I had the urge to giggle hysterically. In hindsight, that is not the reaction a sane man would have to the sight of his beloved chopped up into gruesome pieces. But as they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty.

She was, for lack of a better word, strewn upon the dining room table. It had been shifted to occupy the centre of the room, the bloodstained mess upon it a stark contrast to the chrome finished, stainless steel cabinets.

She had always admonished me upon my messiness. Now she was the mess. The irony was bitter.

As though that thought was the trigger, a flood of thoughts filled me, a rush of emotions. My rationality was buried under the veritable avalanche of feelings. Predominantly, I discovered, anger and despair and helplessness and the cold grip of survivors guilt--

However as soon as this revelation unveiled itself, the thoughts stopped. A vacuum of silence encompassed my being. Distantly I wondered if I was in shock.

I was probably right.

A foreign emotion welled up inside me. It was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I was a driving force, a resolve, an objective. I knew what I had to do.

I had to take from the perpetrator the very thing he took from Her, life.

Preferably painfully.

-x-

I am going to do it. I am going to kill him. No, I am going to murder him.

My hand shakes from the adrenaline alone.