Zen

He was laughing maniacally, his once pearly white teeth now stained a deep brownish red. Haunting brown eyes stare into her soul, possessing her thoughts. She can’t move. She can’t feel a thing. The knife slicing her thigh, the man tearing at her muscles and ligaments, the tears falling from her face.

Clumps of blood cake her naked body, deep gouges decorate her back and provide her with an unwanted layer of wet warmth. Yet, she’s freezing cold. Her once long and pretty sun kissed blonde hair is now short, ratchet, and matted with blood, sweat, and dirt.

He continues to talk to her. His face and chest are covered in her slimy pieces. A sharp silver knife rests in his left hand, he picks up pieces of her flesh with his teeth as he leans down and licks her bright red blood from the large wounds on her leg. All of her joints are purple and swollen, from her hip joint to the little ones in her fingers.

As he feasts on the discarded look of her tortured body, face, and mind, he sees life finally start to slip from the once lively baby blues that she possesses. Her body goes even limper than before. Blood starts flowing a little less as her naked chest finally ceases it’s once neverending movement.

With a discontented sigh, the boy sits back on his knees, his face wrinkled at the dead girl in front of him. Disgusting. After all of our fun, she leaves just like that. How vapid. He stands up and walks to the large metal sink a few feet away from him. He cleans his face, hands, and chest with the water. Streams of red flowing down the drain like wasted paint. Once he is clean, he rests his weight on the hands pressing into the metal ring of the sink, a sigh drips from his mouth. Now I have to deal with this mess.

His dilemma is short lived, however, as he grabs the large kitchen knife that rests on the counter a few inches away. Turning to the mangled corpse, he begins to saw away at the body’s already tortured joints. He severs the legs from the torso, then the thighs from the shins. The feet from the shins, and the toes from the feet.

He goes back to the lacerated torso of his victim and slices her down the middle, sternum to stomach. He pulls back her flesh and smiles grimly at the sight of her internal organs and bones. He feels as though something is missing. He sits back onto the hardwood kitchen floor and thinks for a moment. Music.

A large smile decorates his face as he hums his way over to the record player. He sifts through the colourful records, in search of a worn mustard yellow one. Once he finally finds it, he takes the record from its protective casing and sets it gently onto the record player.

He knows this one by heart. As the record spins, he delicately places the needle in the exact spot it needs to be, and the sound of the song fills the heavy air. Trumpets blare as he takes the knife to the woman’s chest, slicing the skin of her breast. It’s squishy in his hand, now covered in red stains. He hums along to the melody of the song, the familiar sounds triggering past memories. He continues to work on the woman’s torso. Cutting. Slicing. Severing. Breaking.

He then moves to her shoulders, dissecting the joints haphazardly, for it won’t harm her, she’s far too dead for that. Continuing to chop and toss her limbs as they land loudly on the wood flooring. Once he finishes, he reaches her face. For fun, he decides to play with her hair, taking groups of the blonde strands and hacking away at them, the disregarded hair falling to the floor uselessly.

They pile under her divided and limp body. He looks at her tear stained face in disgust, eyes wide as the terror of her last memory still lingers. Ghastly. No wonder this bitch was so desperate. He thinks before taking the knife to the corner or her saddened mouth.

“Oh, no, no. This won’t do. You look so sad, and we can’t have that. Why don’t you put on a smile?” He asks, the edge of the blade now wedged between her lips, pressing into the corner connecting them. With slow movements, his knife cuts through the skin of her cheeks and stops at the start of her bloodied ears, the sound of tearing flesh accompanies the grand music. Once finished, he sits back on his knees to admire his work. “Gorgeous! See, isn’t that so much better, my love?”

He receives no answer from the corpse. Her jaw permanently hinged open, her smooth skin split and irritated. The woman inside her had been stripped out. Tortured into the deep abyss of her soul before finally ascending at death. All that is left of this woman, this life and story, is a mess of broken bones, sawed limbs, chopped flesh, and blood.

A sad ending to any life. After he finished with her jaw, he quickly lost interest in her. No point in continuing. With an annoyed sigh, he reluctantly takes her limbs and other body parts and cuts them into even smaller pieces.

His stomach swirls as he recalls the taste of her fleshy body. It was unpleasant. Yet, he wants more. He wants to eat all of her. Her liver, her lungs, her toes, her nose, her tongue. Yes, he’s always wondered what a tongue would taste like, the inception and ironic implications of tasting the thing that tastes amuses him. He scampers back from his thoughts and turns his attention back to the task he set to do previously.

It’s strenuous work, and by the time he’s finished, the song has long since ended, the sound still lingering in the deep depths of his mind. The cold body parts are squished into a black garbage bag, double wrapped. Then, the bag of human is placed in a cardboard box, the box is sealed with tape and placed in the back of his car. Though she is dismembered, the parts of her body are still weighted, and by the time he finishes hauling the corpse into the boot, he’s exhausted. His kitchen is still messy from his hobby. He groans at the thought.

He runs a hand through his brown hair, the short strands settling back into their places almost immediately. He wants to not care, to let the blood, dirt, and smell pile up, but that’d be worse than death for him. Giving in to his subconscious, he grabs bleach, cloths, buckets, and sponges, ready to clean the mess she made. As he scrubs furiously, his mind recounts how he met the woman two weeks before. His friends had made him go drinking with them, the adults bar-hopping throughout the night before deciding to end by partying in a new, high-end club.

The club they went to had many men and women crowded into it, sweaty bodies, the smell of alcohol, and sex filled the space. He had to keep himself from gagging as he walked in, a pleasant smile plastered onto his face. He sat at the bar by himself, while his friends drank and danced their thoughts and feelings away.

“Deimos! Bro! What’re you doing just standing here? You look like a fucking loser!” A young man in ripped jeans and a white button down drapes himself on top of Deimos, his curly blonde hair damp with sweat. Deimos resists the urge to shove him off, the smell of sweat and desperation oozing from his friend disgusts him in many ways.

Despite his want to send his “friend” across the room, he just smiles and laughs loudly. “What’re you talking about Mikey? I get to see all the action from here, I’ve got my eye on someone too,” Deimos tells his friend as he subtly shifts the blond off of him and onto a barstool next to them.

Mikey smiles wide and claps Deimos on the shoulder, the taller flinching minutely at the contact. “That’s my boy! Go out and get some bitches tonight,” Mikey praises before he stumbles his way back onto the dance floor. Once the drunk blond is gone from his sight, Deimos’ polite smile is wiped completely from his face, an uninterested expression taking its place.

His dark eyes scan the room, music booming behind his ears and into his head. A blonde girl catches his eye, well, the person dancing with the blonde girl catches his eye. The girl is short, around five foot five, her dress is a bright pink and doesn’t leave much to wonder about. Her hair is shiny yet mussed up, face bright and eyes shining.

The guy dancing with her is peculiar. He’s attractive. On the shorter side too, maybe five foot eight at best. His hair is an unnaturally vivid red and falls over his eyes lazily, he has an easy smirk on his face as he dances with the blonde girl. But, it’s his eyes that attract Deimos’ attention. They’re a violent purple, the shade the same as a February amethyst.