Fireside Magazine Issue 8 by Brian J. White

Author:Brian J. White
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Forever Endeavor: Part Five

16. MURDER-SUICIDE

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: December 21st, 2010.

Dale is shaking.

He throws open the door to his rat’s nest apartment, shoulders his way in, immediately moves to remove the gloves on his hand — biting the woolen fingers with his teeth and flinging them to the ground.

His hands are rusty-red. The palm-lines etched with old red. The creases in his fingers flaked with it.

Blood.

From inside his coat closet: a moan, a thump, then:

“Help.”

A mumbled entreaty, not a yell. Dale ignores it, goes to the sink, washes the blood off. No soap? No Brillo pad?

“Jesus, I live like an animal over here,” he mutters, the water over his hands turning the color of cherry Kool-Aid before swirling down the drain. He grabs a dishtowel and uses that to wipe the blood from his mitts. Now the towel is stained red. It’s evidence, he thinks.

Of course, what kind of evidence could it be?

It’s his blood, after all.

Still, he finds an old Wal-Mart bag under the sink, bundles the towel up in there and shoves it in a cabinet behind some dishes. A lame hiding place for a thing that probably doesn’t need to be hidden.

He looks around. Disgust fills him like a hot, foul wind bulging his sails. Susannah will never go for a place like this. He needs to upgrade.

Which is becoming rapidly possible, thanks to the Box. Which hangs heavy in his bag.

From inside the closet, another scrape-thump. Then:

“Hello. Help. Hello. Help.”

Dale opens the door.

Other Dale stares back. Bound to a chair. Blood matting hair to his temple, his cheek. His eyes gain focus, then lose it, then gain it again.

“You,” Other Dale — Concussed Dale — says. “Or should I say, me?” He makes a bubbling sound that might be a laugh.

“You okay in here?”

“Zippity-Doo-Dah,” Concussed Dale says. “I can’t feel my face.”

A fact that’s obvious by the way he opens his mouth to speak and spit bridges the upper and lower lip. White foam collects at the sides of his mouth. He licks at it with a pasty tongue.

“You don’t look good.”

“That’s ’cause you hit me in the head.”

“I had to.”

“You didn’t,” Concussed Dale slurs. Then, during a moment of focus, his eyes flick downward, casting a gaze toward Dale’s hands. “You got blood on your hands. I don’t mean that pheta — unhh — metaphorically. I mean it literally even though nobody seems to know how to use the word literally anymore, you know? Sad what people do to words.”

Concussed Dale sometimes rambles on like this: periods of quiet or mumbling punctuated by a flurry of run-on sentences and musings. A symptom of the head wound? Or something else?

Right now, Dale doesn’t much care. Because of the blood on his hands.

“You really did it,” Concussed Dale says. “You went ahead with it.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re a murder. Murderer. You murdered him.”

“Not him. Me. Which means it can’t be murder.”

“Suicide, then.”

“It’s not — no! It’s not suicide. Because I’m still here!”

“So whaddya call it?”

“I… I…” He grinds his teeth. He blurts: “I’m just eliminating redundancies.

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