A sense of elation washes over me mixed with pure heated rage when I think of that sick fuck laying his hands on Abby the very night she let me into her heart and into her bed. I can’t stand to think about my poor frail Georgia in the hospital clinging to life. Even when I think of a defenseless and harmless old woman, walking to her own death while thinking she was doing nothing more than helping people, I feel a rage I sometimes find hard to tame.
Abby and I stopped talking about Owen entirely after that. The people of Coral Pines assumed he was drunk one night, fell off the seawall and drowned, like so many of the town’s alcoholics before him. I’m sure they thought his body had been made a good meal of by an alligator or wild boar in the mangroves somewhere.
No doubt, some of the town folk had their suspicions about me. I’m sure they thought I could be responsible in some way. After all, Owen had always hated me, and we’d publicly brawled on occasion. They knew how little we cared for each other. But, the sad fact was that not many people gave a shit about where Owen might have gone.
I had his very own mother on my side.
Bethany knew I killed Owen. How? I told her. I was no fucking coward. I told her while we were still in the hospital what I was going to do the second I knew my girl was okay. She knew she couldn’t stop me and said she wasn’t even going to try. She knew as well as I did that Owen was like a rabid dog and had to be put down.
What I hadn’t expected was for her to ask me to kill her as well. She practically begged me.
It was sad, really.
She told me she couldn’t live with what she’d done to our family, and she didn’t know if she could survive the death of her only son. She still loved him, no matter how broken he was.
Story of my life.
Bethany had called herself a ‘human wrecking ball’. Fitting, maybe, but not punishable by death. Honestly, I had considered it. But, I wasn’t a fan of killing women, and Georgia and Abby seemed to actually like the bitch.
So, I made her a deal.
Instead of killing her, I promised her that even though I was Georgia’s biological father and not Owen, she could still be part of our lives and our family if that was what she wanted. She just needed to heal.
We knew a thing or two about healing in our house.
It wasn’t easy in the first few weeks after Owen “disappeared”. Bethany came to see Georgia, but couldn’t look me in the eye. As time passed, she became more accepting of our new—and unusual—family dynamic and became a regular at our house.
As a consolation of sorts for killing her son and refusing to do her in, too, when she mentioned filing the divorce papers, I offered to take out her husband for her instead. Abby kicked me under the dinner table.
Bethany opted for the divorce.
I killed her son, and she comes over every Sunday for family dinner.
My daughter calls her Grammy.
The world is a twisted place, for sure.
It may have appeared that I was a changed man on the outside, but I couldn’t help but smile when I thought of the night I sank Owen’s body into his deep dark grave at the bottom of the swamp. A laugh would sometimes involuntarily escape my lips when I glanced above the mantle and saw my knife collection on display, hanging from one the little hooks Bee bought for me at the flea market.
The knife in the center, the one with the red handle and serrated edge, was the one I used to slit Owen’s throat.
I’m not sure whether I viewed it as my prize possession or an inside joke.
Maybe it was both.
Slitting someone’s throat may have sounded like the * way to kill, and I would have agreed with that... if it was done from behind like most pussies would do it.
That’s why I looked that motherfucker dead in the eye as I told him he was going to die. That’s why I pushed him up against the wall of the boat-house and covered his mouth with my left hand and used my forearm to hold him still while I slowly carved out his throat with the knife in my right.
I stared right into the depths of that scared motherfucker’s non existent soul and ignored his pathetic gurgling pleas while I watched the life flow out of him with the blood that poured from his neck, sending him into the depths of hell where he belonged.
Someone might as well have wrapped up that day and given it to me on Christmas morning. A revenge kill is the best kind of kill.
But a revenge kill for your family, with your woman’s permission?
That’s borderline erotic.
Now, I’m just a simple family man, receiving love I know I don’t deserve, and sleeping like a baby after a fifth of Jack Daniels.
I’m not stupid. I have no doubt that when I meet my end, I will descend into the hell that’s been saving me a spot in its torturous embrace since the day I was born.
I also know that when I get there, I’m going to spend my time finding Owen and killing him over and over again.
The End