The Collection

This information is found on page 32.

The young man did not object when I took him in the men's room of the gas station.

He was standing at the urinal when I entered, and I stepped behind him and held the knife to his throat. I used my free hand to yank down his dress slacks, and then I pressed against him. 'You want it, don't you?' I asked.

'Yes,' he said.

I made him bend over the side of the lone toilet and al­though his buttocks were hairy and repulsed me, I made him accept me the way my wife had. All of me. He tensed, stiff­ened, and gasped with pain, and I felt around in front of his body to make sure he was not aroused. If he had been aroused, I would have had to kill him.

I slid fully in and nearly all the way out fifty-six times be­fore my hot seed shot into him and with my knife pressed against his throat I made him cry out 'Oh God! Oh God!' the way my wife had.

I left him with only a slight cut across the upper throat, above the Adam's apple, and I took his clothes and put them in the trunk of my car and later stuffed them with newspa­per and made them into a scarecrow for my dead wife's dying garden.

I hoped the young man was a doctor.

***

I realized the importance of measurements even as a child. When my sister fell out of the tree in our yard, I meas­ured the length of her legs and the total length of her body. Her legs were twenty inches long. Her body was four-foot-five.

My mother was twenty years old when she gave birth to my sister.

My sister died when my father was forty-five.

Requirements:

I was required to pay for the knowledge gained from my sister's measurements.

My sister had two arms and two legs.

I killed two cats and two dogs.

My wife was Jewish. Before coming to the United States, her parents lived 196 miles from the nearest concentration camp and 32 miles from the city where Adolph Hitler spent his youth.

My wife was born in 1956.

I showed Nadine a book on self-mutilation, letting her look at photographs of men who were so jaded, who so craved unique experience, that they mutilated their genitalia. She was fascinated by the subject, and she seemed particu­larly interested in a photo of a man's penis which had been surgically bifurcated and through which had been inserted a metal ring.

She told me that the concept of self-mutilation appealed to her. She said that she had grown tired of sex, that all three of her orifices had been penetrated so frequently, so many times in so many ways, that there were no sensations that were new to her. Everything to which she submitted was ei­ther a repeat or a variation.

I told her I would make her a new opening, a new hole, and I took her to the forest and I tied her to the cross-stakes and I used a knife to cut and carve a slit in her stomach big enough to take me.

She was still alive when I entered her, and her screams were not entirely of pain. She kept crying, 'God.'

My white semen mixed with her red blood and made pink.

I wanted to kill the doctor who killed my wife, but I saw him only once after her death and it was with a large crowd and the opportunity did not arise again.

So I rented a small apartment and stocked the shelves with medical books and arranged the furniture in a manner consistent with the way I believed a doctor would arrange it.

The apartment number was 56.

I made friends with a young man who, save for the beard, resembled my wife's doctor fairly closely. I invited the young man into my apartment, smiling, then I showed him the gun and told him to strip. He did so, and I made him put on the white physician's clothes I had bought. I forced him into the bathroom, made him shave, then made him put on the surgical mask.

I had purchased a puppy from the pet store the night be­fore, and I had killed the animal by slitting its throat, drain­ing the blood into a glass pitcher. I splashed the blood on the young man and now the illusion was complete. He looked almost exactly like the doctor who had killed my wife. I had written out the lines I wanted the surrogate doctor to say while I killed him, and I'd typed them out and had them bound in plastic.

I cocked the pistol, handed the pages to the young man, told him to speak.

End Exchange:

DOCTOR: I killed your wife.

ME:           You wanted her to die!

DOCTOR: She deserved to die! She was a bitch and a whore!

ME:           You killed my son!

DOCTOR: I'm glad I did it! He was a son of a bitch and a son of a whore and I knew I                                couldn't let him be born!

ME:            That means that you deserve to die.

DOCTOR: Yes. You have the right to kill me. I killed your wife and son. It is only    fair.

I shot him in the groin, shot him in the mouth, shot him in the arms, shot him in the legs, left him there to die.

In the newspaper article, it said he had bled to death four hours after the bullets had entered his body.

He had been a stockbroker.

I have clipped my toenails and fingernails once each week since my wife died. I save the clippings and store them in a plastic trash bag that I keep underneath my bed.

On the tenth anniversary of her death, on what would have been our son's tenth birthday, I will weigh the bag of nail clippings and then set the bag on fire.

I will swallow ten teaspoonfuls of the ashes.

The remainder I will bury with the body of my wife.

I will use the information gained from the weighing to determine the date and manner of my death.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the date of my birth.

My initials are J.F.K.

Cataloguing:

My store has sixteen nonfiction books containing infor­mation about llamas. There are five fiction books in which a llama plays an important role. All of these are children's books, and three of them are Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle stories.

I have killed sixteen adults since my wife's death. And five children.

Three of the children were siblings.

The llama has changed my plans. The llama and the retarded boy.

I stare out the window of my store at the dead animal, at the retarded boy next to it, at the occasional gawkers who pass by and stop and whisper. I know that one of them, one of them over whom I have no control, will eventually notify the authorities and they will take the carcass away.

I cannot let that happen.

Or maybe I can.

For the presence of the llama in my alley indicates that I have done wrong and that a sacrifice is demanded.

But who is to be the sacrifice, the retarded boy or myself? Neither of us knows, and we stare at each other. He out­side, next to the animal, me inside, with my books. Through the dirty window he looks vague, faded, although the llama still seems clearly defined. Is this a sign? I don't know. But I know I must make the decision quickly. I must act today. Or tonight.

I have measured the body of the llama and it is four feet, ten inches long.

Tomorrow is April 10.

Full Moon on Death Row

Some years ago, a British editor decided to put to­gether an anthology for which authors would write stories based on titles the editor provided. The titles were all cliched horror images, and the one assigned to me was 'Full