Anna laughs as Casper dances enthusiastically yet without co-ordination, spurred on as he is by alcohol stolen from Peterson. She encourages him to be more adventurous and so he steps forward to try and break-dance. The smallness of the studio reduces him to a heap upon his back, his bloodstained hands stabbing the air with no particular rhythm. Anna sits upon the edge of the bed, her arms wrapped around herself and her thoughts dangerously skimming near the blood that seemed to pour out of Peterson yet not kill him. She had always seen death, and murder along with it, through the window of a silver screen. One fired a gun and the victim died. One stabbed with a knife and the victim died, albeit slower. Any blood upon your hands would wash off in an instant given the right soap.
Yet now, now she had seen it as it was, an agonising event for all those involved. The one who has killed loses their life; the one who kills loses a part of themself. Of course this is what Kasper wanted. He saw himself as a jigsaw, with the pieces that made him what he was placed there by someone else, society itself in fact. Thus, the more he took away the pieces that were meant to act as a kind of moral wall, the closer he would come to true freedom. None of this freedom in our times crap, this manifestation of an ideal.
‘Live in our world, our white picket world and one will be free. Free your mind and the rest will follow.’
He was not one of these people who believed in spiritual awakening in karma in doing good deeds to others so good deeds would be done unto yourself he didn’t see the need to travel into some Indian backwater to find himself for it was not himself he wanted to find in fact he didn’t want to find anything he wanted to create something he wanted to build a new man one with boundaries one that could save a poor kitten from violent animal abuser killing the abuser horrifically before strangling the life out the kitten and throwing it at some child in the street.
... I want to push a pregnant woman ...
Anna didn’t yet understand this. She didn’t share his logic, his belief that all one had to do was dissemble oneself, find the cracks and tear down the walls so that you would be as free as freedom was meant to be. Anna was a child of suppression. She blocked out the simple math of how Casper had dealt with Peterson and what he may have done to her family, basking instead in all that was taking place around her. Additional to this suppression was that of the mystery of Monday, something that had cleared somewhat now that they had acquired the guns. Instead of therefore seeing the fate that was fast approaching, she saw only Casper, romanticising him into someone she would follow naively into whatever life he would take her. It was all fiction to her, images with no depth and no reality save the one that hung on the edge of her thoughts like a nightmare that lingers on the cusp of sleep.
She laughed harder and raised herself unsteadily to her feet to help Casper up from the floor. It was the drunkest she had ever been and as such the world was a spinning twilight of amazement, personal fulfilment and a touch of fear, a cold slice of something that was tied to her morals yet which she could recognise as nothing more than some weight that pressed upon her.
She reached down to grab Casper’s hand and in a flash he had pulled her down upon him, taking her in his arms and laying kiss after kiss upon her as she giggled and let her worries vanish in the warmth of his hold. Music raged around them, and, only a few feet from where they kissed, the guns that they had stolen from Peterson lay upon the floor, spaced out as if the person who had placed them there had done so for some sort of display.
They fell into their dreams, wrapped in the rhetoric of the future and an ignorance of the past that haunts both of them. Casper held it back like bile in his throat while to Anna it was like panic lurking in the midst of her self-control. They kissed and laughed and rolled about and he reached for one of the bottles they had taken from Peterson’s house, both of them paying no attention to the dark patches on Kasper’s hands.
... I want to feel the recoil of a weapon ...
Kasper is looking at Anna intently, his face scarred with a hint of anger and more than a dash of frustration. He spits as words rush from him and Anna cowers at his outburst, a storm arisen from what she too feels building inside.
“... they’re just as bad as the fucking rest of the mother fuckers I can’t understand why anyone would give a shit about them they’re total fucking assholes ...,” he pauses for a moment looking around for something to give more credence to his anger, more depth to the words he’s forced to use. “I’d fucking kill everyone of them if I could the fucking ... fucking fuckwits.”
He grabs the vodka bottle and drinks from it with vehemence and more than a little desperation.
“None of it’s for them, it’s for me. Me!”
Anna watches him, knowing that them is everyone, and that the hate that he’s trying to keep down marks him as one whose demise has already begun.
YOU ARE READING
Wants, Tightrope, Spilt Milk
General FictionCasper Carter has wants. He wants to be famous. He wants to be remembered. He wants to teach us all to be animals again by killing, by torturing and by writing his name forever in blood. How? Well, as a teacher he stands before the perfect set of vi...
