Gleefully Macabre Tales

by Jeff Strand

  The cop led the wino out of the alley. "You stay put," the cop told me as he passed. I nodded. The cop took the wino to his squad car, which was parked alongside the sidewalk not too far past the alley, and put him in the back seat. Then he returned to me.

  "You say he attacked you?" asked the cop, taking out a notebook.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Start at the beginning."

  "I was on my way home, and I passed this alley here. He asked me if I could spare a dollar. I felt badly for him, because here I was on the way to my heated home, while he clearly didn’t have a home, so I agreed."

  "Go on."

  "I took out my wallet, which was a mistake, I know, but I’ve always been trusting and naive. I forget that not all human beings follow God’s path. As soon as I did so, he began to strike me."

  "Did you fight back?"

  I lowered my head. "I’ve always been passive."

  "So may I ask why he thought you were going to kill him?"

  "Oh, he didn’t mean me."

  "Who did he mean?"

  "Lucifer."

  "Lucifer?"

  "As he was striking me, I informed him that his sins were putting him in the path of Lucifer, and that Lucifer would most likely kill him and drag his soul to Hades. He got upset."

  "I see."

  "I don’t know if that’s true or not. I just wanted him to stop the physical violence."

  The cop stared at me for a long moment.

  "Are you trying to bullshit me?" he finally asked.

  "No, sir. Is it standard practice to use that kind of language around civilians? I’ve just been through a traumatic experience, and I don’t appreciate the sting of your profanity."

  He stared at me for another long moment. I wondered if I’d pushed the act just a bit too far.

  "I’ll drive you to the hospital," he said.

  "I’m fine."

  "He beat you up pretty bad."

  "I don’t have medical insurance. And nothing seems to be broken. All I need is a relaxing hot bath and my waterproof bible."

  "I at least need you to come in to the station to press charges."

  I shook my head. "I don’t want to press charges. Just give him a warm place to sleep off his intoxication. The best thing you can do for that poor man is check him into a rehab program. I don’t need revenge. He’ll burn in Hell anyway."

  The cop continued to stare at me. It was making me uncomfortable. I was starting to think that maybe I should casually reach into my inside jacket pocket and…

  "Fair enough," the cop said. "You sure you don’t want a ride somewhere?"

  "No, no, I’m fine. I’ll use the walk for silent reflection."

  "All right. Try to be more careful next time. You could’ve been killed."

  "Thank you, officer. I’ll remember that." I walked away, unsure if I was a brilliant actor or if the cop was really dumb. Most likely it was a combination of the two.

  Now what? I still didn’t have any kind of sawing instrument, but thanks to my unconsciousness, I’d been gone much longer than planned. I was a lot less horny after getting the crap beat out of me, so I considered just calling it a night and letting Gretchen deal with her homicide problems herself.

  But I couldn’t.

  It wasn’t because I was scared that she might call the cops on me. Well, okay, that was part of it. I’d done my share of the attempted murdering, and as a woman scorned she may very well have tried to blame the whole thing on me. Because I’m a complete dumbass, I’d certainly left behind fingerprints and DNA evidence and all that stuff, so it was not in my best interest to leave that loose end untied.

  And…I dunno…I kind of liked her.

  Don’t worry, I wasn’t in love or anything retarded like that. I wasn’t gonna make goo-goo eyes at her or hold her hand or make babies. I just kind of realized that I liked her a little bit more than simply wanting to bang the hell out of her.

  So I went back.

  - 6 -

  Through some sort of amazing miracle, I made it back to her apartment building without getting beat up or soiled. I pushed the buzzer.

  "Yes?" her voice crackled through the speaker.

  "It’s me."

  "Where the hell have you been?"

  "Getting hurt. Let me in."

  "Don’t you know I’ve been worried sick?"

  "Just let me in."

  "I want an apology first."

  "Say what?"

  "Apologize and I’ll let you in."

  I couldn’t believe this. "I don’t owe you an apology."

  "Then you can stay out there for all I care."

  "I’m here to help you!"

  "You need to start thinking about other people besides yourself. For all I knew you could’ve been lying dead in a ditch somewhere."

  "I was unconscious in a fuckin’ alley! Is that good enough?"

  "Apologize."

  "Screw that!"

  "Then I guess we have nothing to say to each other. Good night."

  "All right, all right, I’m sorry! Jesus!"

  "That’s not an apology."

  "Yes, it was!"

  "Not said in that tone of voice, it wasn’t."

  "Bitch!"

  "Okay, then you can really stay down there."

  "I got mugged! I almost got killed!"

  "Uh-huh. Likely story."

  "It’s the truth!"

  "You were out drinking with your buddies, weren’t you?"

  "No I wasn’t out drinking! This is ridiculous! Open the door!"

  "After you say you’re sorry."

  At this point, I wanted to throw back my head and let out a primal scream of misery that would rattle the windows, crack the pavement, and echo throughout the heavens.

  Instead, I’m said: "I’m sorry."

  "Apology accepted."

  The buzzer sounded, and I opened the door.

  I stomped up the stairs, not caring about how much it hurt. Then I twisted my ankle and started to care again.

  Who did she think she was? Apologize. Yeah, right. I was helping her! I was putting myself at risk to assist her with her problems, and I deserved a little bit of respect. If she didn’t appreciate all that I was doing for her, well, then it was over between us.

  The door was already open when I got to the top of the stairs. Her pissed-off expression immediately changed to one of concern as she saw me. "Oh my God! What happened?"

  I told her the whole story, leaving out the embarrassing parts. I tried to leave out the part where I got pissed on, but I had to explain the scent.

  "Oh, you poor dear," she said. "Did you get the saw?"

  "No."

  "Isn’t that why you went in the first place? What, did I need to make you a shopping list for two items?"

  "There were distractions!"

  She sighed. "Men."

  "Don’t blame my gender! If you got mugged, you sure as hell wouldn’t have come back with a chainsaw!"

  "Well, lucky for us, while you were out playing with the boys, I went to Wal-Mart." She pointed to a plastic sack that rested on the dining room table. "Brand-new hacksaw. Have at it."

  It took us a while to get the hacksaw out of the packaging, but I don’t feel like sharing the details. I mean, c’mon, let me retain some shred of dignity, okay?

  Oh, yeah, I also changed out of the pants that the wino pissed on, and into a pair of her husband’s dork pants. No dignity for me.

  Then I knelt down beside the poor guy and pressed the hacksaw against the back of his neck.

  "Do it," Gretchen urged.

  Instead of requesting that she please shut the fuck up, I began to saw. The saw went through the already-cut part pretty easily, and then I encountered resistance.

  "Ow," said her husband.

  I yelped. Thrice. Then I scooted away from him. "Shit shit shit shit shit!"

  "What’s wrong?" Gretchen asked.

  "Shit!"

  "What’s wrong?"

  "He said ow!"r />
  "Well, you’re cutting off his head!"

  "I thought he was comatose!"

  "He didn’t say it loudly!"

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. This decapitation was definitely not worth it.

  "Saw off his head and he’ll stop saying ow!" Gretchen said.

  I scooted back over to him. I could do this. Become one with the saw. The saw is my buddy.

  Once again I placed the blade in the groove, and pulled the saw back toward me. It made sort of a…I’m not quite sure how to describe the sound. I don’t wanna say it was crunchy, but that’s sort of what it was like. I gave the saw a few more back-and-forth strokes. It was definitely working. This fucker’s head was going bye-bye for sure.

  Fresh blood started to trickle from the wound. I turned my head away and kept sawing. It was becoming more difficult, but I was still making progress.

  Then the resistance stopped. The saw cut through the remaining throat-flesh with no problem.

  "Don’t scrape up the floor!" Gretchen said.

  "Do you wanna be next?"

  "I’m just saying, I’ll lose my security deposit."

  "You’d be amazed how little I care about that. Really. You’d be astonished. One of those astrophysics scientists or whatever they’re called couldn’t even measure how little I care about your stupid floor using one of their molecular scales."

  "What are you babbling about?"

  "Fuck your floor." I did one last slice, and that was it for hubby’s head. It rolled onto its side, no longer attached to his body.

  "Wanna try your mirror now?"

  Gretchen nodded and went to get it.

  "I was joking!"

  "I know you were. But we’re still going to check."

  "If it’s still breathing, I’ll french kiss that head," I told her, knowing that if the head was indeed still alive, I’d do no such thing.

  Gretchen returned with the mirror. "Roll the head over."

  "You roll the head over."

  She looked like she wanted to start our four hundred and ninety-seventh argument of the evening, but settled for muttering something under her breath (I detected traces of "bastard" and "asshole") and rolling the head so that it was face-up. She placed the mirror in front of his lips.

  We waited.

  Nothing.

  After a couple of minutes, Gretchen set down the mirror and checked his pulse.

  "He’s dead," she announced.

  "Woo-hoo!"

  "Thank goodness."

  "So let’s go fuck," I said, suddenly horny again.

  "Are you for real?"

  "What? That was the deal, right?"

  "Yeah, but not with his headless corpse bleeding all over the place! We need to saw up the rest of it and get it out of here."

  "You just said to kill him. You didn’t say that I had to perform disposal services."

  "I can’t believe you want to have sex right after you’ve chopped off somebody’s head. What does that say about you?"

  "I’m a stud."

  "It says that you’re sick. You’re a sick man."

  "You’d better not be thinking of backing out of our deal," I warned her. "I’ll fuckin’ kill you."

  "I’m not backing out. I just thought it was understood that I wouldn’t be pleasuring you until my husband’s body stopped oozing! Jesus, you’re foul!"

  "You make that sound sexy."

  "We’ll finish slicing up my husband’s body, then we’ll get rid of the chunks, then we’ll take a long shower, and then we’ll get some sleep—and no, you can’t spend the night—and then I’ll pay you."

  "That wasn’t the agreement."

  "That’s the agreement now."

  I know what you’re thinking: "Damn, Frank, why didn’t you just backhand the tramp and make her pay up?" I considered it. I mean, yeah, I was still in a lot of pain from earlier, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t give her a good solid slap across the face.

  I’m not sure why I didn’t. On one hand, I guess I was worried that she might go absolutely apeshit berserk on me and start screaming and freaking out and hollering for help and then my only option would be to get the hell out of there and spend the rest of the night making sweet, sweet love to the artificial vagina I got as a gag gift one year, and that thing chafes. On the other hand, I simply didn’t want to hurt her.

  It was mostly the first one.

  So I sawed. I cut off his arms and his legs, wrapped them in old issues of Entertainment Weekly, and stuffed them into garbage bags. I sawed his torso into quarters (not exact quarters, but close enough) and we wrapped and bagged those as well. Gretchen mopped up the floor, and then used her Swifter Wet to get up the last spots.

  "That wasn’t so hard," I said. "Shall we hit the shower?"

  "I’m going first."

  "Not together?"

  "Do you know what the most overrated erotic experience is?" Gretchen asked. "Showering together. You spend half the time shivering because you aren’t getting any of the water, and the spray off the other person gets in your eyes, and the only things the guy is ever interested in helping you wash are your tits."

  I nodded. "Yeah, you’re right. And it’s not really sexy to watch the other person washing their ears and that kind of shit."

  "Not at all."

  "Fine. I’ll go second."

  "Thank you. I’m glad to see you’re not always a jerk."

  I had a pretty funny jerk-style comment to make, but decided against it. I wish I could remember what it was. Now that’s gonna bug me for the rest of this story until I think of it. Damn.

  She headed off for the bathroom, and I stood around in the kitchen, itchy in my gore-stained clothes, looking at the garbage bags.

  "I hope the extramarital snatch was worth it," I told the bags.

  The bags did not answer.

  I opened up her refrigerator and looked through the contents. Lots of nasty stuff, like soy milk and veggie burgers and apples. At least they had a couple of beers. I grabbed one, popped it open, and chugged most of the can.

  "Don’t touch my beer," somebody said.

  I glanced around. There was nobody there.

  I finished off the can and let out a nice long belch.

  "That’s not your beer!" The voice was muffled. It kind of sounded like it was coming from one of the garbage bags.

  I tossed the empty beer can in the sink, then took the second can out of the fridge. I waved it at the garbage bags.

  "You don’t drink another man’s beer!" the voice said. One of the garbage bags—the one I was pretty sure contained the head—shifted a bit.

  I stared at it.

  Nah.

  I popped open the beer and took a tentative sip.

  "You’re buying me another one," the voice warned.

  I kicked the bag. "Shut the fuck up," I told it.

  "I don’t care if you screw my wife, but leave my beer alone! I’m warning you."

  I set the mostly full can of beer down on the counter. "Gretchen! Your husband’s head is talking!"

  She didn’t answer. She probably couldn’t hear me over the shower. I hurried out of the kitchen and knocked on the bathroom door.

  "What?" she asked, annoyed.

  "Your husband’s head talked to me."

  "What did he say?"

  "Not to drink his beer."

  "So don’t drink his beer!"

  "The important part isn’t the beer! The important part is the talking head!"

  "Let me finish my shower, for God’s sake! I’ll be out in a minute!"

  I walked back into the kitchen. I picked up the beer can.

  "Put it down," the head said.

  "How can you even see me through the bag?"

  "I’m not seeing you through the bag."

  "Then why is the bag moving?"

  "Because I’m talking to you through the bag. I’m not seeing you through the bag. Why would my eyes make the bag move? You really are an idiot."

  There’d
been plenty of indicators this evening that I should leave the apartment and go home. The talking head was the biggest one. But I was more curious than scared.

  I took a defiant sip of beer. "So what are you gonna do to me, head?"

  "I’m going to send your soul straight to Hell."

  "Bullshit."

  "I am."

  "You’re bluffing."

  "Don’t test me, mortal."

  I took a big swig of his beer and swished it around my mouth just to piss him off. "One, if there is indeed a Hell, then I’ve already damned my soul about seven hundred times. Two, I don’t believe that a severed head has that kind of influence."

  "You’re wrong."