ATROCIOUS ACTS
BY RICHARD GODWIN
*
BY RICHARD GODWIN
Love is the most dangerous
force on the planet, not hate.
More atrocious acts are perpetrated
in its name than in the name of all the other gods that govern human behavior.
Jealousy corrodes.
Envy eats away at a man’s soul.
Hate makes men violent.
But love corrupts outwards
from a wound. It may do so entirely.
The erosion is both silent
and inevitable.
It is the stealth flower with
seductive scent that kills.
For in its hallway of mirrors
lie the thousand images of yourself you burned and burn to be and those who
know how to caress those silent places steal in there and lie drinking the
fresh blood from your soul.
For in all the songs that
ooze from your radio, and all the depictions of love in all its forms, there is
no common ground.
You enter the quicksand.
*
And so it was that Eduardo
Silvestrone entered the newly adorned kitchen of his $5 million house and shot
his wife and her sister through the head at point blank.
His hand did not tremble as
he held the Glock, nor did he shake when he inspected them for a pulse.
He had spent everything on
adorning his immaculate home which was admired by everyone. But no one knew
him.
He had been shaking for a
week before the incident, a fact observed by his employees at the car plant he
owned and had started working at years ago before he acquired it to support a
wife thought by many to be a mercenary whore.
He had been shaking that
morning when he got up, opened a bottle of Tequila, poured it down the sink, and
cursed everyone he could name in the short breath that held the oxygen in his
lungs before he vomited bile at the cheap hotel where he had been hiding before
he carried out what he later referred as Apocalypse One.
Apocalypse Two could wait.
Eduardo had waited long
enough.
Waited wanting death.
Waited while his wife lied.
While she shopped and taunted
him.
While he worked.
And watched.
And learned that love was a
bruise that became infected.
And if the infection was a
lie then the lie needed to be eliminated.
But what if the lie was
embedded in his heart with silk knots?
Eduardo decided the name of
love was not worth the parchment it was first written on and that humanity was
a whore with a tattooed conscience that sold its soul for narcissism and
flowers.
For the first time in years
he considered himself.
He weighed himself up in all
his propensities as he had been weighed up.
He had small brown eyes that
lit up when he felt hope.
He had scars on his back from
where his mother used to beat him.
Sometimes she would burn her
cigarettes into his skin while her lovers watched and they would fuck in front
of him as child.
That was before they broke
his bones so badly in different places that he was taken to the home.
His mother would entertain
different men at weekends after his father left them.
He didn’t remember him, just
a face and a voice that he had no connection to. He wanted a father and would
imagine him, drawing clear lines that etched a face into the darkness. But they faded again and again until he gave up
his childish doodling, knowing it was the indulgence of hopelessness. He was orphaned
by men and was lost within the silent perplexity of his own gender and had no
one to lean on. Eduardo hated Sundays.
They were worse at the home
where he was treated with the dumb indifference reserved for animals by carers
with not even the satisfaction of a decent salary.
He would often get a taste in
his mouth that he thought was the memory of some exotic fruit he had eaten as a
boy.
And he would try to identify
the tang of it, but all he could remember were his mother’s beatings and hiding
in the dark with a face so sticky with tears he wondered if his body had lost
all its salt.
There was no fruit served at
the table of the home, and he longed for the exotic taste to connect him to who
he was. Even on the weekends the food was always tinned and cold.
And so it was he gave up on
the thought of nourishment. And hated Sundays.
Until he met Mariella.
It was, he said, an epiphany.
He was walking in the park
where the summer flowers were dying and he saw her in a lavender jacket.
And in that colour there
seemed more life and vibrancy than any petal.
But it was her perfume that
caught him.
Exotic and full of promise.
She seemed to reside in its
smell, as if it was the signature of her being.
He did not even feel the
small and slender hook pierce his skin.
She turned to look at him and
in that instant that stretched to some infinity of knowledge and the sum of all
he was. He felt trust for the first time.
And he could not name it nor
his profound need for solace and so he fell into her trap.
She asked him for directions
to a place he knew and in that knowledge he felt important and assured and he
suggested a drink.
They sipped cool absinthe
while the sun died and he held her in his shaking heart like a bird he had
caught by the sea.
They conducted an old-fashioned
courtship during which he would often enjoy Mariella’s smiles.
He later learned these were
the glances of contempt.
He asked her to marry him.
And so began the only happiness
he had ever known.
And it existed only by virtue
of the fact that she was deluding him. For she had learned her ways at the hand
of such a deep addiction to betrayal that she spun lies from a handheld loom.
She would often lick her
lips, running a perfect tongue along their spotless contours, a gesture Eduardo
thought seductive.
In time he understood it was
nothing more than the anticipation of the pain she would inflict.
And Eduardo loved her deeply
and Mariella used him and sank her hungry teeth into this soul.
They bought a house and soon
Eduardo’s hard work benefited them enough for his avaricious wife to be
fulfilled. They upgraded while he took on extra hours and she abused a series
of lovers who she enjoyed humiliating at destinations from which she could
never be traced to her home address.
Eduardo brought up two children
who he loved dearly.
Everyone commented on what a
loving father he was.
He seemed equipped with a
deep ability to love them. Not for what he wanted from them but for who they
were, as if he had intact within him a reservoir of giving he had never
received.
Their real fathers never knew
of their existence.
Mariella told her sister, the
morning she died so unceremoniously, ‘Men do what I want. I always exploit a situation to
its maximum.’
Her sister hated her but used
her for her own means, listening to Mariella’s endless ostentation of her
vices.
She was Mariella’s only
confidante and never saw the gun coming.
Eduardo found out his wife’s
poison by returning home early one day with a bunch of roses and hearing her
talk to her lover on the phone.
He looked at the petals in
his hand and he felt small and obvious and he realized there was nothing exotic
in the flowers he bought and that he would only ever be an ordinary victim who
was of no interest or use to anyone.
He hired a detective who
found out the sordid details and handed him pictures of his wife in various
compromising poses that showed Eduardo a side to her he had never seen, and he
vowed to kill her there and then.
DNA tests proved he had been
fathering the children of other men and that is what hurt him the most deeply.
He bought the Glock from a
store on the way home from work one day.
He walked in through the back
door, startled his wife and blew her brains two meters out of her open skull
onto the new wallpaper.
Her sister’s open mouth
reminded him of a cunt, and he opened her head like a rotten piece of meat.
Then he poured himself a
beer.
He did not consider crying.
He did not even look at her
prone body as she lay there and he stepped over her lifeless corpse and drove
away into a deep blue skyline.
He thought about love, about
its strange machinations.
He thought that it was a lie
invented to manipulate and enslave and he decided to implement the second
stage.
His children had to die.
They were staying with
friends, which he had arranged as he planned this out.
He collected them without
looking at them and drove them to the hotel where he had booked a room, and he
ignored their questions about what was wrong with him.
But when he got to the hotel
he looked at them and he felt love and knew he could not do it.
That was when he despised
himself the most.
He thought of his father.
He tried to remember the
distant smell he had once associated with him but it was like a faded dream.
As he sipped some beer the
tang from his childhood filled his mouth and he knew what it was he used to
taste. It was not exotic, it was the seepage of his childhood wounds dying in
his throat.
He had been haunted by the
familiar memory of pain all these years. And he had mistaken it for
nourishment.
And Eduardo held his children
in his arms knowing that they were not his and that ownership was the scorpion
in a man’s soul and he walked into the bathroom where he shot himself in the
head.
The last thing he heard as he
lay there tasting blood was a love song on the radio.
One of his children had put
it on and he tried to follow the words, but they were distant and he listened
to his dying hart fade, knowing it had already died.
Richard Godwin is the author of crime novels Mr.
Glamour and Apostle Rising and is a
widely published crime and horror writer. Mr. Glamour is his second
novel and was published in paperback in April 2012. It is available
online at Amazon and at all good retailers. Mr.Glamour is Hannibal
Lecter in Gucci. The novel is
about a glamorous world obsessed with designer labels with a predator in
its midst and has received great reviews. Apostle Rising, in which a
serial killer crucifies politicians, is available here.
It is also available for the first time in e-book with some juicy extras, an excerpt from Mr. Glamour
and four deliciously dark noir stories, like the finest handmade chocolate.
