Karl. Morning
The day began with coffee.
Or rather, without coffee.
Karl, still half asleep, reached for the button, felt the familiar coolness of plastic under his finger, and pressed it. Usually at this moment, his kitchen was enveloped in a quiet ritual sound: a low rumbling, the first drops of thick black liquid, the smell of roasted beans slowly spreading through the walls, filling the space. It was the beginning of the day, his unchanging code.
But today there was no response. Only a dry click. One. Two. Three. Then another. And—as if to mock him—a thin, bitter smell of burning.
Karl froze, leaned closer, and looked into the black eyes of the small device. It seemed to him that a dead animal was staring at him from inside. He even imagined a mouse lying under the body, having chewed through the wires and now burned by the current. It would even be beautiful.
He tapped the body with his finger. Quiet. Then harder. Finally, he slapped it with his palm. The machine coughed up some steam and fell silent for good.
“Damn it,” Karl said aloud, even though there was no one else in the room. He liked to hear his own voice—even, calm, firm. The voice of a man who always knows what to do.
He picked up the cup, put it under the spout, and pressed the button again. The cup remained empty. Instead of coffee, the smell of burnt plastic spread through the kitchen—sharp, almost medical. It was as if he were in a morgue.
And then Karl smiled.
“Ten years of loyal service — and now it’s over. Even the machine is tired of this life. I could put it in the middle of the room, surround it with candles, and it would be a nice farewell. But who needs a coffee maker funeral?”
He put the cup aside and sat down in a chair. For a moment, he imagined: what if every object in his house could die like people? The coffee maker — an old woman with a withered heart. The refrigerator — a fat man who breathes heavily. The lamp — a blind child glowing with its last sparkle.
These images amused him. He chuckled.
“Even here, I can’t help but see the composition. Death suits everything.”
He always liked to think that way — in terms of images, death, and rebirth. It was his language, the only logic he truly understood. For others, the coffee maker was just a plastic box with a button, another trifle of everyday life. For him, it was a small tragedy, a micro-performance, the final chord of a long service.
He saw death in everything: in a cut flower leaning downward, in broken glass, in a battery that no longer lit a flashlight. But while others avoided these thoughts, Karl, on the contrary, savored them. He was fascinated by the very idea: everything living or non-living has its own term, its own finale, and every finale can be made beautiful.
He even imagined: the coffee maker could be placed in the center of the room, covered with black cloth, and surrounded by cups filled not with coffee, but with a thick black liquid — blood. The audience would come, watch, and no one would dare call it “just a plastic box” anymore. It would be a scene. It would be a composition.
For Karl, the world consisted of precisely such small scenes. Death was not the end, but an opportunity to create a new form. His victims were not people to him, but material. And now he looked at the dead coffee maker with the same calm interest as he would look at a body that had breathed its last breath.
He smiled to himself: “Everything around me is just a prop. And I am the one who decides how to put the final touch on it.”
The kitchen was quiet, and only the refrigerator hummed in the background. Karl placed a cup under the spout of the coffee maker, hoping for a miracle. After all, the Third time’s the charm, so why not try again? No miracle happened. An explosion of steam with the melted smell of rubber filled the room. Karl sighed, put the cup aside, and headed for the bathroom.
There, a new disappointment awaited him. The washing machine, which had been working fine yesterday, decided to cause an apocalypse in the kitchen today. The laundry inside was banging against the metal drum as if trying to break out, and white tongues of foam were creeping out from under the rubber seal. They grew rapidly, climbing onto the tiles, spreading across the floor, covering everything around with a soapy ocean.
Karl stepped into the cold slime and felt his shoe slip. His body lurched forward, his hands instinctively grabbed at the air, and only the door saved him from falling. A vertebra clicked in his back, painfully reminding him that even the body is not eternal.
He froze like that, bent over, looking down at the foamy flood. And he smiled.
“Oh, how symbolic,” Karl thought. “The police haven’t been able to catch me for twenty years, professors of criminology build theories about my genius, and a washing machine almost sent me to a better world. It’s even beautiful. Investigators with their profiles won’t catch me, DNA won’t identify me, psychological profiling won’t crack me, but household appliances will. And not some clever trap, but an ordinary Indesit. So, I’ve been playing chess with the police for twenty years, and I lost a “sea battle” to washing powder. My finale? The chronicle will write: a serial killer slipped on his own underwear and died a heroic death from foam.
It suddenly seemed to him that this foam was not just water and soap, but the bodies of his victims dissolving, floating up in white flakes of skin. He saw a small reflection of himself in every soap bubble — distorted, ridiculous, caricatured. The world was laughing at him.
He wanted to laugh, too. And he laughed — quietly, muffled, to himself. His shoulders shook, and the sound echoed off the empty kitchen walls, as if someone were laughing with him.
It was one of those rare moments when Karl admitted that the world was sometimes wittier than he was. And there was a special pleasure in that — in feeling that even he, the genius of death, could be outwitted by an ordinary washing machine.
He went out onto the street already in a bad mood. The car — an old Opel, but a faithful companion — started only on the third try, coughing as if it itself wanted to go to the hospital. Karl patiently listened to this metallic cough, patted the steering wheel as if it were the back of an old horse, and finally drove off.
After about ten kilometers, the Opel made its last heroic exhalation and stopped in the middle of the road, groaning with a long metallic moan. Karl sat in silence for a few seconds, listening to the engine choke like a drowning man. Then he got out, stood in front of the hood, and sighed.
He tried the old-school method: he kicked the bumper. Offended, it simply fell off in one piece and hung on a bolt. Karl laughed:
“Great. The coffee maker is gone. The washing machine flooded the place. Now you. My personal household appliance apocalypse. If the toaster dies tomorrow, we can open a museum of failures.”
He stood on the side of the road, feeling the absurdity of the moment: a serial killer who had been leading the police on for twenty years was now standing in the rain next to the corpse of an old Opel.
Just a few minutes ago, the day had been surprisingly bright. The sun was shining on the windshield, the road was shimmering with a warm haze, and there was no hint of bad weather in the sky. Karl even felt something like calm — a rare state for him when everything around him looked too normal.
But as soon as the Opel choked and died in the middle of the road, the sky seemed to decide to play along. Clouds appeared suddenly, as if someone had pulled a heavy curtain, and the light began to dim. The air became thicker, stickier, and the first drops of rain fell on his face.
Karl buttoned his coat and raised his hand. He stood there for a long time. The first car roared past, splashing him from head to toe with mud from a puddle. The second flashed its headlights and disappeared into the distance. The third didn’t even slow down.
He stood like a statue, wet, with his arm raised and a briefcase with documents in the other, staring at the endless road.
“I could use this,” he thought. “An image: a man abandoned by the world. Wet, helpless, in the cold rain. A body that no one will take away. It would be a perfect installation.”
He even imagined himself from the side: a lonely figure in the middle of the road, the sky pressing down, the earth swallowing him up. And it almost felt cozy.
And just when the absurdity of the moment reached its peak, a black Volkswagen appeared. It rolled up smoothly, without any sudden movements, as if from a rehearsal. Behind the wheel sat a young man—thin, pale, with dark circles under his eyes. A real student.
“Need a ride?” the guy asked, rolling down the window. He had a crooked, guilty-looking smile: his eyes were tired, his lips were tight, but he was still trying to look friendly.
“That would be great,” Karl replied. His voice always had the amazing ability to sound even, warm, and reassuring, even when he was telling an outright lie. It was with this voice that he once persuaded his first victims to get into his car. It was a voice that people wanted to listen to because it carried no threat.
He opened the door and slid into the seat. The interior was narrow and cramped, as if designed specifically to make a person feel trapped. Still, Karl settled in comfortably, stretched his legs, and ran his hand over the smooth upholstery.
The air inside had its own character. It smelled of cheap, sweet deodorant, the kind advertised on television with the promise of “success with women.” But on top of that was a sticky, suffocating aroma, like caramel that had spilled on a table in a cheap coffee shop and had already begun to ferment. The smell was too intimate, too personal, and Karl felt a certain nervousness in it.
He glanced at the driver: thin, too thin, pale skin, dark circles under his eyes from sleepless nights. A real student, the kind he had seen thousands of times. Naive. Superfluous in his own life. Perfect “raw material.”
“This salon, this smell, this guy—it’s a ready-made scene,” thought Karl. “It’s as if I’m already sitting inside an installation where I’m the main actor. And the only question is: who will be the director—me or him?”
They set off. The wheels rustled softly on the wet asphalt, and a brief silence fell in the car. All that could be heard was the windshield wipers scraping across the glass, leaving blurred streaks.
The young man broke the silence first:
“Are you going far?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound indifferent, but it betrayed him, rising a tone higher.
“Just to the city,” Karl replied, easily and casually. “I have some business there.”
He smiled slightly as he said this. This smile was his second nature: insincere, but convincing. He always smiled when he lied, and in twenty years, no one had ever noticed.
The young man nodded too quickly and, as if to fill the void, began talking about the university, his studies, and the teachers who “did not understand his generation.” His words came out in fragments; he paused, stammered, and started again. Karl immediately recognized this tone—justification. That’s how people who are afraid of looking suspicious always talk.
Karl listened, maintaining the same indulgent smile, nodding from time to time, while a completely different picture was forming in his mind. He looked at the thin fingers nervously gripping the steering wheel; at the sunken stomach, which betrayed years of self-neglect or poor diet; at the large, moist eyes that glowed in the semi-darkness of the cabin.
“This guy is pure material. A pale, puppet-like face. I could use him. Put him on his knees, hands up, face to the light. Next to him, another, stronger one, like a guard. A scene from the Bible. People wouldn’t take their eyes off it.”
His imagination unfolded, as vividly as ever: he saw colors, shadows, even smelled fresh blood in the cold air. The picture was so vivid that he felt warmth in his chest, almost tenderness — a strange memory of his first love, only his love was always for the dead.
Twenty years and not a single failure. Twenty years — and not a single clue. He was a ghost, a shadow, a genius who painted his pictures from dead bodies while remaining invisible. He loved this game: one step ahead of the police, always in sync, always half a breath faster.
And the funniest thing was that he was even paid for it. The police hired him as a consultant when they were at a loss. He sat among them in meeting rooms, sketching profiles on paper, pondering “possible motives,” listening ironically to their absurd theories. Sometimes he even nodded, pretending to be fascinated. But in his head, there was only one thought: “I’m here, right in front of you, and you’re so blind that you’re even thanking me.”
He recalled how he once took the body to the forest a few kilometers from the road, and the next week, in a suit and with a folder in his hands, explained to the investigator that “the killer is most likely operating in this area.” The investigator even thanked him for his insight. Karl barely managed to hold back his laughter — it would have been too obvious.
He always liked to remember this. It was his favorite joke. A joke that had lasted two decades, and every time he uttered the mundane phrase “I’m just a consultant,” he wanted to applaud himself.
“Do you like your job?” the young man suddenly asked, without taking his eyes off the road.
Karl turned his head, looked at him, and smiled sincerely. He didn’t even hesitate with his answer:
“Very much.”
His voice was warm and completely honest. Because, in fact, he loved his job more than anything else.
And then it all ended.
The young man abruptly, without a word, without any prior gesture, pulled out a knife. Small, funny, pocket-sized — the kind used in camps to cut sausage for sandwiches. But the blade was sharp, and that was enough.
The metal easily pierced his throat. Karl didn’t even have time to think that some grand, solemn scene was about to take place, something worthy of his twenty-year career. No spotlight, no final chord — just the dull, mundane movement of the student’s hand, who didn’t even know how to hold a knife properly.
He choked. In his mouth — the taste of iron, warm, too warm blood. His eyes widened, like a child seeing something scary for the first time. They were not just surprised — they were filled with terrible, helpless confusion, absurd despair.
“No... it wasn’t supposed to be like this. This isn’t the script. This isn’t my composition. I’m... I’m in control. I’m God. I’m a consultant... I can’t just... just...”
But God, it turns out, falls just as senselessly as any drunkard from a bar counter. No compositions. No installations. No grand finale.
Just a wet road, fogged-up Volkswagen windows, and a boy trembling, clutching a knife — a gift from his grandfather, probably given to him with the wish to “always carry it with you, it will come in handy.”
Karl fell on his side, his body swaying helplessly. Like a curtain falling in a cheap theater.
And at that moment, it seemed as if the world itself sighed with relief. As if this whole absurd spectacle had dragged on for twenty years, and finally the curtain had fallen.
