That’s quite a theory you’ve got going there. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you meant it. But you don’t. Let me tell you a little story.
When I was a little boy, I had a group of friends, four or five other kids, that all played with me after school. We used to go out to the creek and catch frogs, set things on fire, the typical things you would expect. There was this one kid, a few inches taller than the rest of us, a real ugly son of a bitch. Let’s just call him Trevor, for the sake of the story. One day, in the late summer, we all decide to have a camp out in Trevor’s backyard. So we set up a tent and sit around in our sleeping bags eating potato chips and telling ghost stories until everyone falls asleep. In the middle of the night I hear this noise, it was kind of muffled, like a puppy whimpering from inside a box. I don’t sit up, because I’m scared of what might be making that noise. I just turn my head toward the sound, real slow, hoping like Hell that whatever it is isn’t after me. And it wasn’t. There was Trevor, with his shorts down and his dick shoved down one of the other boy’s throats. The sound I’m hearing is this other boy, probably begging Trevor to stop. Now I could have woken everyone up, I could have run inside the house and screamed my ass off, but I didn’t. I shut my eyes, and I turned my head back around, and I lay awake the rest of that night trying not to piss myself. All I could think is; “That won’t happen to me. I’m not like that kid, I’ll keep my mouth shut and that won’t happen to me.”
What happens to a person in life can produce some serious dysfunction. A person can go through life with the memory of something inside of them that is so deep and so undeniable that they have to stay sick just to keep the sickness of it at a distance like an antivenom. On one hand, you can be a regular Jack, working for a living, watching television, eating fried chicken. And on the other hand, you can go home, sit alone in your closet and cut your legs open with a steak knife just to see yourself bleed. There are three people in every one person; The person they see themselves as, the person other people see, and the person they really are. I’m okay with the person I see myself as. Other people, well, what the fuck do they know? But the person I am, the person I really am when no one is looking and I’m not paying attention, there’s that little boy who looked away. There’s that beast that watched something like that happen and didn’t do a damn thing to stop it. There’s that part of me that wants to kill.
So, Ingrid, tell me about your daddy.
-Mercy
end fifth letter
next letter
previous letter
the mercy killings
return to the last car