It’s been twelve years since I last murdered someone. It was a rather abrupt ending for such a long and great career of mine but it was a “Happy Ending”.
What drove me back then wasn’t, as people usually assume, the urge to kill or some sexual perversion. It was “Hope”, for a more perfect pleasure. Each time I buried a victim, I repeated to myself that I can do better next time. The very reason I stopped killing was because that hope vanished. Or is it the poems and the writing that made me soft? Maybe all those “thinking” stifled my impulses. But it was a happy ending nonetheless I guess.
At first, I didn’t want to suppress the feelings boiling inside me. I felt as if I was being shoved into a deep, dark cave. A sudden change of need, after killing for more than a decade, made me think I was trying to be submissive. I just needed to know if I was who I knew myself to be, back then. And when I opened my eyes, I saw kajal in front of me—chance is often the beginning of bad luck.
It was my last murder. A murder without any pleasure….
---So, I killed her
But it wasn’t easy.
It was disappointing.
It was disgusting.
For the first time in my life I felt disgusted for killing someone. I wondered why? It wasn't my first time feeling disgusted over murdering someone but usually it was more about the tedious process. I felt lost. I finally understood that all those stupid “Happy Endings” had seeped into my bones, successfully maiming my fangs.
For a long time I used to keep a journal where I kept the notes of my murders. It was some short of a daily log for a more perfect murder. But what I didn’t know was, how it would change the very person I am.
Coming up with sentences to write down was more grueling than I thought. It was not like I wanted to be literary or something but the words I learnt couldn't express my feelings of pleasure.
I am a veterinarian. It’s a good job for a murderer. You can use all kinds of powerful anesthetics. You can bring an elephant immediately to its knees. But the words I learned in those texts wouldn’t even kill a fly. So I joined a community poem class. I thought I would just give it a try and kill the instructor if it was boring. But surprisingly it was fun.
The teacher made me laugh at the first lesson. So I let him live. Maybe he still doesn’t know that he’s living on borrowed time. Anyway that teacher made me interested in literature.
From the beginning I didn’t understand emotions, but I could respond to humor. When I was younger, I tried understanding others but it was too hard of a task for me. So I averted their gaze by nature. Those people probably thought I was some shy kid. Later I learnt a simpler way– when they smiled I smiled, when they cried I cried. It was simple but effective.
My first work was named “Death Sleep”. The instructor remarked that my use of language was fresh. He said that its raw quality and the perceptive way I imagined death depicted the futility of life. He repeatedly praised my use of metaphors. So I asked, “What’s a metaphor?”
The instructor grinned—I didn’t like that smile—and explained “metaphor” to me. So a metaphor was a figure of speech.
– Ah-ha.
Listen, sorry to let you down, but that wasn’t a figure of speech. I just wrote about the process of my first murder honestly.
My first murder was my father’s. My father, who beat me and my mother habitually, would chase us out in the middle of the night in the winter. I don’t regret killing him, it was the best solution but after that day my mother no longer knew how to act around me.
Eventually she ran away. Dealing with my father’s death wasn’t hard, no one cared about a drunkard dying in his sleep. But they didn’t know how I put the pillow on his face and slowly smothered him to death.
Two years after my mother left, I tracked down and killed my mother, dismembered, and tossed her into a pigpen. It was just another addition to the numerous people I killed. But I’ve left more people alive than I’ve killed, so it was okay.
As time went by I became more engrossed in literature; stories, poems, especially “Happy Endings”. I don't know, something about a predetermined ending made me feel something inside, I'm not really sure if it was something good or bad. And slowly the once thrilling experience of killing soon seemed torturous. I should have realised it when I let that scammer live then I could have spared myself from that disgusting corpse at the end.
One Day someone from the class told me he liked my poems and asked if he could borrow them for some time. Soon he ran away with my poems and published them as his own. He gained more than enough money and became a poet people looked up to. All this didn’t matter to me. It was my fault for giving them to him. It hit me when I realized that I not only trusted a random stranger but even my first thought was how it’s my fault rather than thoughts of killing him. That’s when I felt a nauseating urge to prove my guts wrong and killed Kajal.
On the way back from burying kajal, all I could think of was how disgusting it felt. And suddenly my car crashed into a tree and flipped over. The police said that I was speeding and had lost control around a curve. I was taken for a brain surgery. Suddenly I was floating in lukewarm water. It was peaceful, tranquil. Who am...I? where's....this place? It felt peaceful like never before. And it occurred to me that maybe whatever changed in my mind was happening for a long time. Maybe this is what I want, What I need, this is the “Happy Ending” I was craving for. And with this surgery it became irreversible.
A gentle breeze blew into the empty hospital hallway and I continued swimming in it. The silent, still world became smaller and smaller until it turned into a speck of dust in the cosmos, and even that disappeared.
Police are still searching for the famous Decapitator. Sometimes when I go to the markets I hear the sirens and remember my past but it's a happy ending nonetheless. I don't regret my actions but I can now admit that I'm no saint. It is exactly what a good ending sounds like to me.
[Author's note: sorry if it was not good or not upto the topic. It was the first story I've ever written. Hope you liked it as much I do :) ]
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