Viale Omicidio

   Viale Omicidio

A short story by Kathleen

Final draft

There's something to be said about sleep shrinks who become insomniacs, constables who commit crimes, vestals who fall pregnant. They all go against the nature of their livelihood.

The full moon lit up the scene. A night sky that would soon lend itself to dawn. It radiated a light on the pond that was the picture of eerie. It was far from the kind where choirs of angels sang and descended from the heavens, but rather the kind that manifested the wildest of human behavior. The rusty, orange- grey clouds shifted across the sky at a snail's pace, taking turns hiding and displaying the moon. When the clouds broke away from the celestial body, the glare that it casted down on the pond was so luminous, Poeniteo could see his reflection peering up at him. In it, he saw a princely man who looked the definition of tall, dark, and handsome. He stood at a whopping six foot and four inches, his hair a deep chestnut, forever slicked back with gel. He had even olive skin and a five o'clock shadow that was the subject of envy from other gentlemen in their mid twenties. You would never catch Poeniteo dressed to anything less than the nines, as he constantly wore a suit that fit his slim build to a tee. Before he quit his job, his colleagues would often ask how he got his dress attire to look so debonair on him. "Tailor-made," he always replied. Just the two words. It never failed to fill Poeniteo with some twisted pride when he brushed other people off.

He didn't feel so peachy keen now, though. While he continued to oggle his moonlit reflection, his demeanor was scornful, angry to have been pushed to do what he had done. He hesitated just a moment, then turned on his heels to go back inside and face the massacre he created.

All along the ceiling beams in rows of four by four, hung corpses with ropes tied tightly around their necks. Poeniteo approached the woman who hung somewhere among the midst of the dead bodies. He untied the noose from around her throat which sent her limp body falling to the floor of his killing chamber. He sat cross-legged and held Theadora in his arms as if she were a baby. Poeniteo ran a calloused finger over the gash in her neck and took note of the fact her body was still warm. To Poeniteo, it felt utterly scalding, but his mind, overwhelmed with the sin he just committed, was likely playing tricks on him. He found it bizarre that he was getting so worked up over Thea's death. She was far from his first kill, but he couldn't quite shake the feeling that this death would come back to haunt him. He hoped her family members wouldn't think him too much a vile person for doing this to her. He tried to take his mind off of the thought by petting her long, coffee brown hair. Poeniteo rocked her back and forth in his arms for a second longer, then with a sense of finality, he took his index and middle finger and lowered her eyelids over her, now, lifeless obsidian eyes. He hung her body back up with the rope. 'Just like a Christmas ornament,' Poeniteo thought gruesomely.

Poeniteo turned his attention to the other fifteen bodies in the room. He decided he needed to clear some of them out. He would bury them in his usual spot, downwind of the moonlit pond. Not only was rigor-mortis beginning to set in, and the smell was becoming too heinous to handle, but he needed to make room for next week's batch of victims. He glanced at the man who hung next to Theadora. Poeniteo didn't favor men, this one's demise was simply one of mercy. Poeniteo had caught this man entangled with Thea behind the town's market, and in an act of rage, hit him upside the head with a rock. By the time he dragged the man to his killing chamber, he was fading in and out of consciousness. Poeniteo had taken a machete to his head and nobly put the man out of his misery. His face was unrecognizable now, as it was maimed and mutilated, but he had tawny hair and a familiar look about him. Poeniteo took a second to deconstruct the man then put him back together in his head. He ended up letting it go, figuring if you've seen a couple of dead bodies, you've seen them all. Surely faces blend together over time.