Forensic Science woke up one morning with a terrific headache. He stepped out of bed and sharply tilted his head in one direction, immediately the other, and stepped blindly out of the tiny bedroom.
Stumbling, fiddling in the kitchen, he by some miracle soon sat at the table with his coffee reading the newspaper and whistling for his wife, Buddhist Education, who had taken sole residence as of late in the larger bedroom he had once so enjoyed his sleeping in.
Forensic Science walked out of his house, to his car, and on the way he noted seventy-three fresh samples of dog seamen—it was mating season—and seventy-nine bird droppings and one-hundred sixty-seven samples of bird dropping residue.
He looked his car up and down; he climbed in and drove to headquarters.
Once there he watched boring movies the day long and read tabloids on the toilet and by the time he left this mind was numb and it didn't matter that his glasses were not cracked, by that point he simply had no need for them and all he wanted was to get drunk.
Thus Forensic Science went to the bar with some friends and saw a woman he wanted more than he had ever wanted Buddhist Education hanging about the other end of the bar.
He looked at her; he looked her up and down; she caught note of this and walked over to where he sat with his friends. She said words he didn't hear—he was wrapped up in the enigma of her body language.
She tapped his nose; she tilted his somewhat haggard face with somewhat haggard features upward. She said more words. He heard now, he processed them.
They involved his buying her a drink. He obliged. It was how she said they would “start,” which obviously led him to believe they would “progress from there.”
Until he took evidentially note of her wedding ring, and she took advantage of the moment to play that particular card. Nonetheless she convinced him to buy her two more drinks, though she became worried wondering why he continued to do so in spirit of the Ace card she'd already lain on the proverbial card table.
Again he looked her up and down, and now she took worried, careful note of it. Which soon turned into a lust for sex, a hunger, which she suppressed and, seeing the card she had so wisely played before so plainly providing direction in the situation, she stood and made to walk away from him.
He let her go.
She was relieved when she saw him leave the bar—despite her mild arousal at his manly appraisal earlier, she had won fair and even square with her card. He would not get what he wanted due only it, and perhaps it alone, and perhaps neither would she.
Forensic Science, as she sat inside the bar looking more beautiful than Buddhist Education ever could and getting drunker than he or Buddhist Education ever did, hid his vehicle in the dark behind the bar building.
He stood in the bushes, darkened but the light of the moon, waiting for her. He rolled and smoked a cigarette, something he only customarily indulged in—the tobacco was fine, rare, and Turkish, and it cost roughly one-seventeenth of a cent per shred, thick-shredded—industrial size, as he called it—anyway.
She came out alone, beautiful in the light of the street lamps, and she was confidently fiddling with her keys and her car as he strode across the parking lot, the while formulating a plan to forever distill her unique beauty, no matter what became of her—for better or for worse with her.
He came up behind her.
She stumbled suddenly, drunkenly backwards a bit and he felt a pang of guilt for feeding her so much alcohol. Imagine if she had driven, he thought, she might have killed herself anyway—and that wouldn't even be any fun for anyone.
She bent forward, trying to open her door, when he lunged forth and took her—at first not even shrieking, then screaming on all floors of her lungs—toward his vehicle, which sat idly and sinister in the dark behind the bar.
There wasn't anyone around to hear her cries; they went un-noticed as crocodile tears in a swamp.
He stuffed her into the back seat of his vehicle, he commanded her to hold that obnoxious tongue of hers. For some reason his command made it through the drunken haze she had stumbled into, and she became quiet suddenly.
He took her to some woods, more darkness he noted alongside many species of animals that roamed the night, and climbed into the back of the vehicle with her.
He took stock of her; she was beautiful as ever—he burned the image into his mind; in his mind he blurred the bruise he had earlier given her, and would soon blur far more defilements to her beauty.
He looked her up and down; he raped her.
Once the deed was done, he did all that was necessary, including dispose of the victim—post-climax the mere shell, after all, of beauty she had once been—to keep himself out of trouble.
This piece was originally published in GwI in October, 2005.
P. H. Madore is the primary operator of disproductions and editor of dispatch litareview.
