The world is full of routine, even the most twisted of us have one. Gacy had a routine when he buried all those young men beneath the floorboards. Wournos had a routine when she blew away her customers, groping, questing parts and all. Gein had a routine as he painstakingly stitched all those various bits of people together, belts of nipples and hand skin gloves.
Naturally, I have one too.
Mondays typically find me at the gym, though it’s often full of fair weather bunnies who flock in to try and make up for a weekend of overindulgence. I think they know, though. Humans, for all their intellectual bluster, are just herd animals like sheep and cattle. I think they can smell a predator, even on a subconscious level. Maybe it’s the blood. The strongest soap and most scalding water can never entirely erase that smell once it’s in deep, once you’re bathed in it over and over.
Tuesday is grocery day. I used to go on Monday, but food stamps and other government assistance monies go in on Mondays, so I would have to fight against a surging tide of mother hens (it’s always the mothers, too; the cockerels, if they even exist, stay home) leading varying numbers of snot-nosed, skinny chicks. Acrylic nails trace along boxes of cereal as if the “8 added vitamins and minerals!” listed would somehow fortify their straggling brood. There are invariably two types of hens: loud, boisterous women with sparkling jewelry and bad taste, their children swarming like plague around their monolithic mothers. The second kind is smaller and more furtive; they slip through the cracks, darting in and out of shelves when they can manage, their silent children huddled like frightened deer. I could almost feel sorry for these latter women. The dark circles beneath their eyes and sunken bellies tell a story of want, and of worry.
Wednesdays, I hunt. Most people wait until the weekend to go, figuring that they’re more rested and will have more time, I suppose. That may work for pheasant, duck, and deer, but humans are a different animal altogether. By the weekend, my prey is more rested too, and may be on their guard. Wednesday is hump day - Tuesday is too early, they’re too fresh yet, and Thursday they’re starting to perk up and look forward to the weekend. Wednesday is good. People are slow on Wednesday, complacent. Wednesday turns people into drones, and drones are good. Drones don’t run very fast.
Thursday is prep day for me, but I suppose it could also be called Crying Day. Or Dawning Day. When the prey first wake up down cellar and notice the shackles on their ankles, see the bare concrete walls and floor stained in old, brown blood…most cry. They cry and plead and scream, rattling their shackle chains and clawing at the walls. I’ve found more than once fingernail stuck in the seams, the edges ragged and bloody. All the noise used to distract me and I’d miss an edge that needed sharpening, or I’d forget to unclog the drain. A few minor disasters taught me my lesson, though. I can’t just call a plumber, after all. I found that meditation helped me keep my focus, sometimes with some light, soothing music. It got me back on my routine.
Fridays are busy. There’s so much to do, and depending on how lucky I got on Wednesday, I sometimes don’t get into bed until the small hours on Thursday. One thing, though, that I never forget is to make sure I lay them out flat, no matter how many pieces they’re in. When I first started this, I cannot tell you how much time and energy I wasted trying to wrestle uncooperative parts into plastic bags, stuffing them into boxes, and shoving them into my trunk for transport. I’ve since bought a truck, but the real trick is to drain them and lay them out flat. All that liquid is heavy, and when they rigor up flat, it’s just like stacking cord-wood.
I have to hustle a bit on Saturday, but only for a little while. I only have about an 18 hour window to get all the items loaded and transported up to my cabin, but it’s not a terribly long drive. Wrap ‘em all in plastic, cover them with a tarp in the bed of my truck and haul ass for the Clean Air Zone. If I’ve done everything right, they will still be nice and stiff when I get there, and will slide beautifully down the greased ramp into the cellar. It’s cool down there year round, and as long as I keep everybody moving, I can usually keep the freshest ones apart from the others. The driest, lightest ones I keep near the door to the inner house.
Sunday is Burning Day. I always take a case of beer and a few steaks when I go up to the cabin, and an indulgence of each rarely sees me up before ten in the morning. I keep a wheel barrow by the door leading down cellar, and after a year or more down there, the bodies are light and easy to stack. One fellow was particularly fat (I try to stay away from those, but as I recall the hunting had been rather bad that week, and he was conveniently making a nuisance of himself) and I think he stayed down there for the better part of three years before I could haul him up. I pile as many as I can into the barrow’s bucket and when them out to the burn pile.
I’ve worked on getting this part perfect for years, but I think I finally got it. I know better than to load the whole thing up with big, vision-obscuring logs because the thing would never burn, but I need something to keep prying eyes from seeing exactly what I’m burning in the event some down-the-road neighbor strolls over to see what kind of barbecue I’m having. A perimeter of large logs with gaps between for air makes up the bones of my pit, and wood pallets make a floor that allows spent ash to fall down away from the flames. I bag those, and every few weeks a neighbor lady in the city buys it for mulching her rose bushes. It’s hilarious.
Inside the log perimeter, I’ve set up a framework of light, dry wooden lengths…I think they were once meant to be rulers, but now they’re just scrap from the local home improvement store. Once I shove them into the cracks between the big logs, they’re strong enough to hold up my burning material. Sometimes the fires are bigger, sometimes they’re smaller, and sometimes I have a bonfire just for the sake of watching the flames dance if I don’t have enough material ready. I require very little kindling, since clothes these days are so full of nice, flammable polymers, and once they’re dry as the bones they used to drape over and at most, it might just take a little kerosene to get everything started properly. It burns all day Sunday, and by the evening, my fire is nothing but smolders, just as planned.
Monday always brings me back to the city early, and unless I’ve made a mess of the ashes, I don’t bother with a shower before I hit the gym. No one gets close enough to smell me anyway. They’re used to seeing me in there, though, those Monday bunnies, so I don’t think they’d notice even if I were visibly dripping in blood and with bone soot still in my hair. On the outside, thanks to my routine, I’m really just another average Joe, just sweating it out on the treadmill until a dark tree of sweat spreads across my back. Just part of the routine.
But I think they know.
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Credits to: http://mladyelle.tumblr.com/
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