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Daddy This is the murder, the picture it makes when (he) squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates hard in the dark. There are no confessions, no admissions of guilt or clues or shaky alibis. Everything is shrouded in a mist of clumsy cover-ups, awkward press conferences and a barrage of eleventh hour finger pointing. Behind the whole engine lies a tank of money, green bills seeped in a shame that grows cold with age in secret, subterranean vaults. It all begins with a man and his telephone in a downtown alley. He ducks behind a trash can and his cell phone rings, twice. "You want done, what is done to others ... the doing ... costs money," says a voice, large and male and scarred deep and pitiless by crystal meth, homeless shelters and homicide. The voice of a demon. "Alright," he replies. "The doing of these things ... it takes time ... money." "I have your money," the man says, hitting "end" and jamming the phone into his back pocket. "I hate your money," he repeats to himself. He steps out into the sunlight and goes for a coffee. "Double cappuccino," he says. The girl behind the counter is pale with an ass like a giant chocolate heart. He wants to reach back there and pinch all of that fat, rolling it and squeezing it in the hollows of his palms, the sweat dripping off his brow as his godhead grows turbo with anger. The girl moves off behind the counter, fiddling about with white cups and metal filters and such. The man reaches down to touch himself, stroking his glans penis through the jeans pocket, watching her ass when she bends over to find him a clean spoon. Every time she bends over he imagines her without her clothes, her vulva winking pink and her asshole slightly mottled with time. He pulls his hand out of his pants and pays the tab. His phone rings again. It is his wife and she sounds angry. "Where were you?" she groans. He hears the assault in her voice - the violence of her anger, her ectopic pregnancies, the retards and syphilis-head failures drooling their lives away in sun-soaked institutions as he fights to keep them all fed and moved about (to prevent bedsores). She rambles on and on in his ear about a credit cards and make-up and diets and shit. It all sounds horrible and hilarious. He nods his head in assent every time she makes a point then says good-bye and hits end. He is to come home immediately. She is obviously in the midst of another one of her crises. Daughter The victim (she) continues with preschool but begins to view the boys with suspicion. The boys have been born with penises and will later go on to smoke marijuana. Some drift into sports and move to urban toilets like Chicago, Denver and New York. Others grow grey and old with suspicion under the shitbrown of the Midwestern sun. The girls play with dolls and make piddle in their panties, dreaming of make-up and dolls and husbands and shit. She complains of the banality of her preschool, the nearsighted ignorance of her schoolmates. Her parents withdraw her immediately. She is to be socialized at home. Daddy and mommy throw all her toys away and chain her to the floor in a cement room in the basement. For company she has a drain in the room's center and a speaker placed high above in a corner. After her daily beating and hosing-down daddy retires to the kitchen, where he and mommy broadcast her education to her over the speaker. They teach her of bulimia, and cars, and make-up, and of the importance of having parents. In between broadcasts daddy calls the demon, speaking about window latches left open and money drops and life insurance policies and when it will all go down in hushed tones that mommy pretends she can't really hear. Daddy also teaches daughter about her body. Boys and their boythings are dirty he says, but daddy isn't a boy, daddies have special relationships with their daughters and daddy's boything is a manthing and a work of art. Daddy's painsnake, rotten with syphilis and oozing purple sores, visits her every night in the form of an angel. The angel stands a full eight feet tall, its head grazing the ceiling. It glides noiselessly through the walls, gathering it's white robes about its emaciated limbs and breathing odorless clouds of CO2 into the air. The angel neither harms nor protects her; it stands by and ministers to her sufferings without comment, its body stripped of empathy, its mind stripped of memory. Mommy never goes down into the basement - she doesn't dare. The idea of her own flesh and blood chained to the floor is simply too horrible. Yes, mommy with her slutgullet stuffed with pills and a watery glass of cheap Chardonnay spilled all over the bed is nothing short of ineffectual. Mommy and her dreams and her warm body fat and fucking the gardener and sucking daddy off for shopping money and cars and make-up and shit. Mommy. She does not want to know about the murder. No, not at all. And so daddy has her committed to a psychiatry ward. Mommy Mommy, mommy, mental hospital mommy. Frequent visits, old ladies pushing brooms around the ward as they listen to the wet, sexual sounds of their innards rotting and babbling "Adadadadadadadadadadadadadad," juvenile delinquents playing chess in the corner, Indians drying out for the weekend, a small fenced-in basketball court within earshot of the expressway where visitors can shoot hoops with the hospital's "guests." He (daddy) takes the children to a white and yellow purgatory where mommy cries without pause and violently massages her temples as she mutters oh shit oh shit oh shit over and over, except when she stops to take her medication. Their visits become infrequent. Toward the end, mommy rots for months before daddy brings the family around for a final chat pending her release back into society. She bends double in her chair and begins her babble, oh shit oh shit oh shit. "What's the matter with mommy?" asks daughter. The other child, sonny, with his oval Arab eyes, stands to the side and glares at his family, a finger stuffed rebelliously up his nose. "Mommy is broken," answers daddy in the simplest terms possible. "But can they fix her?" asks sonny, before relapsing into his usual silent sneer. "No, she is broken forever and can never be fixed," Daddy. Sonny and daughter clasp each other in horror as mommy continues with her oh shit oh shit oh shit. Daddy separates the children with a swift kick of his Hush Puppy. They fall to the floor giggling and crying. An old woman wielding a giant push-broom sweeps them off into the corner. They come back over and sit in daddy's lap. Daddy begins to cry. Murder.com Daddy's mindbrain murder.com multimedia cross-gender ethnic interface rendezvous mega-mall sports riot.com. A counterculture new age free love with a techno backbeat nineties postmodern slant at the public library love-in with a consumer twist.com. Disk drive disk case disk storage capacity units and software for managing busywork on a road rage free base RAM.com. Daddy takes his product out of the garage and into the freedom of the American people who fuck fuck fucker.com. His simple but hopeful recipe for utilitarian (and folksy) software comes during a moment pregnant with money and hookers and car crashes and credit car bills. All of which has to be paid off. Daddy works his ass off, mommy does her best to forget the mental hospital; sonny plays with guns and watches TV while daughter's education continues in the basement and plans for the murder begin to congeal, solidify. Dark house, fireplace, daddy's success, let's toast to it, the 40 million in sales this month alone. Champagne, toasts all around a hearty huzzah. Daddy sucks mommy's teats a bit and imagines the sweet milk seeping over his lips and drooling down the back of his throat with a dim hypnotic cadence more like the humcrackle of disintegration than anything else. Daddy reaches between her legs and tweaks her bean. She moans and stretches back on the couch, arching her back and rubbing her mound against the ball of his palm. He stretches her underwear to the side and looks at her red cunt, open, oozing like a sore (never trust anything that bleeds for a week and lives). He pokes his fingers in and out, her lips farting and sighing with trapped air and exploding bubbles of musky moisture. His thumb moves south. Soon he's worked most of the tip of it into her asshole. He brings it up behind her hair and smells it, then licks it and works it back into her ass. She cries again, with pleasure. Cantankerous daddy sexploitation daddy videos the whole thing, broadcasts it live right on the Internet for ten of millions of viewers to see. Software sales skyrocket. Daddy is now rich. The murder can go as planned. He makes the final call, the one that will set things in motion. The Murder There is a horrific monster out there, a victimizer of children, destroyer of families, a man grown so horrible with introspection that he must suck the life out of innocents in order to rejuvenate the withered wastelands of his own tattered imagination. The demon receives Daddy's call at eleven p.m. on Christmas Eve. By twelve he is crouched down below daddy's window, his breath freezing in the sacred midnight air, the bulk of a TASER crushed uncomfortably into his pants pocket. He slips around to the kitchen and let himself in through the back window, which has been left unlatched as agreed upon. Dark house, dark halls, dark stairs into the basement on tiptoes, the demon slides open the door to daughter's room and jolts her full of electricity as she sleeps. Her little frame expires, deflating with one final tinny gasp as her wastes slide toward the center of the room and down the drain. She is dead. Upstairs, daddy, mommy and sonny sleep like royalty, snoring the night away as daughter's little corpse grows colder and stiffer below them. Daughter's eyes stare upward in a look of disappointment, as if she had expected such a death all along but can't reconcile herself to it. Certainly her education had prepared her for better. The demon leaves the way he has come, easing the kitchen window shut behind him and racing off into the night, laughing and screaming and tearing his hair out. "There is no god!" he screams over and over as he charges down the raindamp street, setting off barking dogs and porch lights throughout the neighborhood, "There is no god!" He slips into his car and begins humming a little tune to himself. "There is no god, oh shit, oh shit! And god is dead, oh shit, oh shit!" over and over, and over and over again as he drives into the night. |
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