My Ghost

I know what I am

I sleep almost two days, only to wake up to the sound of the local news. They say that there is a possible serial killer right here around my neighborhood. This is the first I have heard of it, and for a split second, I begin to worry about my safety. It didn't even dawn on me, at that moment, that they were talking about me.  

As it hits me that I am their serial killer, I can't help but let out a healthy chuckle. I am flattered at first, by their words, to actually have a title, a purpose, a name. They are calling me, "The back alley butcher." This is priceless. I know that I prefer those dark, empty back alleys, but apparently, it's my thing, my calling card, if you will.  

I am also beginning to feel a little nervous that maybe I better steer clear of those alleys for a while, especially the ones around here.  

I feel as though I have had my fill for now. I don't have that urge again yet. I just really want to be lazy and watch some television. Every local news station is on this story. They have criminal psychologists trying to get inside my head and figure me out. They think I am a man between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-eight. They say I probably have been practicing on animals for quite some time before I finally started killing people. They sound more insane than I am.  

I am a woman. I am thirty-six. I have never killed an animal in my life, although, I have watched my grandpa shoot and gut deer. Except for the serial killer part, they have absolutely nothing right, not one damned thing. This angers me. But at the same time, I'm glad they are so completely oblivious to who they should actually be afraid of.  

I worry they may find something incriminating against me. I've been so careful, but I'm sure the FBI is in on this now, so that changes the game, considerably. I have never gotten in any trouble with the law before, so they have no fingerprints or anything else to match me, personally, to these crimes. I just better not get caught in the middle of this in some way to be suspected.  

I was really lucky with offing my husband and not getting caught. I was the last one they would have suspected because he had so many people who hated him. He was always on somebody's bad side with that temper of his. I would sometimes hear little comments like, "It's about time somebody took care of that mean son of a bitch."  

I took care of him, alright. For years he felt nothing but contempt and rage for me. But in the end, as he died, that's not what he was feeling for me at all. I think maybe, in some small way, he actually appreciated the horrific irony of the situation he was in and how he put himself there with the monster he had created himself.  

The night I killed my husband, I had no intentions of doing so. It wasn't planned or rehearsed. It just began happening. He didn't even really provoke it. I just snapped.  

After he witnessed the aftermath of my first kill, he behaved quite well, especially when that guy's body was found and written about in the newspaper. What freaked him out, besides the memory of the blood I was covered in that night, was how I reacted to the guy's photo in the paper. I looked at it, grinned, looked straight into my husband's eyes, while wearing that same evil grin, and said, "he had it coming."  

From that moment until the moment I killed him, he never laid a hand on me, or even said a cross word to me, for that matter. He actually stayed away from me, for the most part. He never told me to do anything for him anymore, which I didn't and wouldn't have, anyway. I was not the same woman he married, and he knew it.  

I don't know why I snapped the way I did, really. I just remember that I was watching a movie in the bedroom upstairs, alone because he didn't dare sleep next to me again, and in the movie, this woman suffered a miscarriage. I immediately started thinking about the miscarriage that no good bastard down stairs caused me to have.  

The next thing I remember is being on top of him, straddling him, and bashing his head and face with a toaster. I hit him in the head so hard that he passed out. That's when I ran to get the duct tape. I knew he would wake up soon, so I just reached down and pulled the sock off my foot and stuffed it in his mouth. I taped his mouth shut and taped his wrists together extremely tight. I rolled him up in the area rug he was already laying on, thankfully that old, thick rug soaked up all the blood before it got on the floor, and I dragged him, somehow, to the car.

Our house, outside of the city, was fairy secluded without close neighbors, and it was very late at night, so nobody saw anything. I managed to get him in the back seat of the car, purely on adrenalin. He was awake by the time I dragged him up to the car door, so his wiggling made it more difficult, but I did it.

I ran in the house to grab the keys and took off, barefooted, except for wearing one sock on one foot and still in my pajamas.

I drove him out to the dirt pit, where the county dump truck drivers load dirt. It was dark and quiet. There was a dump truck out there, ready for another day of work, but other than that, there was nothing or nobody else around.

I had done this at the spur of the moment, so I had to be creative and improvise on my playtime with him. I dragged him out of the car and over far enough from the car so that the car wouldn't get splattered with blood or anything.

I unrolled him from the rug and laughed at the horrified expression on his bloody face. I rolled the rug back up and tossed it in the car to dispose of it later. I came back and immediately started laughing at him again. He was just so terrified that it thrilled me to the core of my being.

After I got over the humorous amusement, I picked up an old bottle of yoohoo that got left behind, and poured it out all over his face. I hit the base of the bottle on a rock and busted off the bottom of the bottle. I smiled at him as he stared at the sharp, jagged glass that his eyes told me, he knew I would be using on him. He was so very right.

Cutting this man apart with the broken glass of a bottle, was the most empowering and therapeutic thing I have ever done. The man that kept me trapped in a world of fear, shame, pain, terror, and sadness, was now totally at my mercy. And I had no mercy to give him.