Sex and Murder Magazine

By Neil Kloster

The clock in the living room chimed with a morbid groan as both arms struck eleven. The house sat in darkness, all except for the living room. The crackling fire popped and spit softly under the tolling bell of the clock chimes. In front of it sat two girls in rocking chairs facing the fire, the one on the left swaying gracefully back and forth with ease, the wood creaking underneath her with every bend. The one on the right sat as still as could be.

Twin silhouettes flickered on the floor behind them as the left one continued to swing back and forth, her stock, thick legs pushing with her pudgy toes: back and forth, back and forth. A thin, horn-shaped prod pierced out from the shadow on the floor at the mid-section, as a shovel sat, resting on her lap as comfortably as a housecat. Globs of drying mud and splinters of pinewood stuck to the cold metal spade, the wooden handle wrapped tightly with black electrical tape. Fine brown hair draped over the back of the chair in wet, curly locks, beads of water trickling down the wood finish at a leisured pace.

Above the fireplace, sitting on the mantle: a collection of childhood memories. Tiny photos of track meets, cheerleading, softball matches and basketball games in junior high, among many others.

In the middle, sat a large white framed family photo, James Brubeck stood in a black, tailored suit next to his beautiful wife Karen, dressed in a white satin dress, a thick, black sash tied around her waist. Their hands both settled on the petite shoulders of their five-year old daughters: Kelly and Katrina.

Kelly stood in front of James in her white dress, just like her mommy and her sister Katrina sat in a small white painted wicker chair in front of Karen. Both girls wore their shoulder length blonde hair pulled back and curled tight. Kelly wore a light blue headband that held her golden locks in place while Katrina wore a soft colored lime green one in her hair. Kelly smiled into the camera while Katrina beamed even wider, showing off the gap from her front tooth that had been gone for almost nearly a week.

The glass of the photo shimmered like calm, resonating water at sunrise and broke into shards of trickling light as the flames flickered and gleamed off the glass with unbridled ambition.

A sharp click broke the serene calm as the door handle from the garage door turned, light spilling into the hallway like flooding water. As she opened the door, Karen was met with a blinding darkness as she almost fell over herself as her feet clumsily scuffed the two small steps leading up into the house.

From behind her, a hand slowly reached for the light switch, toggling it back and forth.

“Must be the bulb,” James said.

Karen turned her head back to look at him in the remaining light. As she did, her nostrils flared, catching the scent of wood smoke that hung heavy in their house.

“Did you leave the fireplace burning? I thought we put it out?”

“We did,” James affirmed.

“Kelly?” Karen calls out, “are you here?”

“Katrina’s old car is still out front. Maybe she got a ride with someone?”

“Who would she get a ride from James? She doesn’t have any friends.”

“None that we’ve met at least. Who knows with her lately?”

As both parents stood in the hall, they heard the soft crackling and snapping of embers bursting just in the next room.

“Oh my God! It must not have been turned off before we left.”

Karen scurried down the short hall in her red high heels, she could see the faint somber glow of shadows dancing over her marble counter tops and writhing behind her white Mr. Coffee pot. As she reached the kitchen, she shot her head towards the fireplace in the living room, and as she did, her eyes met two figures sitting in front of the glowing fire.

“Kelly?” She asked. “Why didn’t you answer us before …and put out that damn fire, you’re going to burn the whole house down!”

James sauntered into the kitchen quietly and turned his head towards the bizarre scene in the living room.

“Kelly, what’s going on here?” James asked then peered closer at her outline with sharp, squinting eyes, “What have you got there?”

The girl sitting on the right remained silent as the one in the left chair stopped her sway with a sharp halt. The chair creaked slightly as she stood up; the head of the shovel fell downward onto the brick hearth with a loud metallic clang. She swung it up and gripped it tight in her left palm. A dark black silhouette now stood facing James and Karen with broad, menacing silence, the outline of a large body holding the shovel with both hands. Wet squishing noises squeezed out from her soles as both James and Karen could see in the dim light of the fire that she was wearing tall rubber galoshes, caked sloppily in wet mud.

“Kelly, what the hell are you doing with my shovel in the house?” James scolded.

“Kelly…” Karen began, the somber sound of fear echoing deep within her tiny mouse-like voice. “Who is that sitting in the chair next to you?”

Karen could see Kelly’s thick cheeks rise up sardonically as she grinned from across the darkened room.

“You can’t tell?” She replied. She shoved the other chair backwards towards them. It fell backwards and tipped over, as it did, the dead corpse of Katrina Brubeck fell stiff from the chair and slid onto the floor with a soft, wet thud. She laid there, her jaw broken and slanted in an obtuse manner, her mouth gaping open in a petrified, frozen scream of grisly horror. Her hollow black eye sockets stared out from the veil of death up towards her two loving parents in an accusatory glance, as if to ask, “Why did you let this happen?”

A sharp, twisting jolt of reverberating terror struck through both Karen and James like lightning, their eyes wide with shock at the sight of their daughter’s body, eight years dead, now laying broken and twisted on their living room carpet like a child’s tattered and muddied rag doll. Her thin, bony arms lay frayed and discolored like rough tree bark. Parts of her soft tissue had gone yellow and greasy like melted animal fat, staining and seeping through the cotton fabric of her favorite Sunday dress.

Karen buried her horrified face into James’ gray shirt, sobbing heavy tears and bellowing muffled screams of shivering pain from the gruesome sight into the top of his chest.

“My God, Kelly, why did you do this?”

“Why?” She hissed back violently, “Because I don’t want to live her life anymore! Ever since she died, you gave me her clothes, her stuff, you made me try out for all the same sports that she did, you tried to make me into her, your little angel. All I ever heard from you was how I was never as good as Kat. That Kat got better grades than me, that Kat had more friends than me, how she was the one that was really gonna be something someday. How many times have we visited her grave, even on my own goddamn birthday, so that we could all be together and mourn her?”

She dropped the shovel from her left hand, it swung down and the spade dug into the carpet as her left hand pointed a sharp, accusatory finger towards the body on the floor, “I’m not the one who’s dead…she is!”

Kelly kicked at her sister’s corpse like a large bag a dried leaves. It flew back, snapping a few of the exposed ribs with the toe of her boot like tree branches.

Karen shrieked, her knees collapsing underneath her as if Kelly had just kicked her in the ribs instead.

“Not so impressive now, is she? The only thing she’s good at now is kindling.” She said with a colorful, buoyant chuckle.

James stood, holding Karen’s limp, quaking body in his consoling arms and glared at Kelly with such a disgusted, disapproving gaze as only a father can give.

“Kelly…” James began, biting his tongue. His upper lip as stiff and as rigid as his daughter’s body on the floor. “I cannot believe that you would do something like this; to me, to your mother, and to your own sister? I cannot believe just how troubled and messed up you’ve really become.”

Kelly’s mouth gaped, a soft scoffing sound escaped from the back of her throat like a tiny cough. Her eyes grew large with surprise and exhilarated anger.

“…But we can help you. You just need help and we can help you. I can call Dr. Perkins and everything will be all right. Remember…remember how you talked about becoming a doctor when you grew up? How you wanted to get into Johns Hopkins. I used to love how you used to go on and on as a child, pretending to operate on your sis…”

He stopped, frozen like a burglar caught red-handed in the glowing pale moon of a spotlight.

Kelly’s blood began to boil, her eyes furiously glowing crimson red as her father had just proved her point.

Wanting to be a doctor was Katrina’s ambition, not hers.

He had been talking about her, his favorite daughter the whole time, as if she were still alive, and not even realizing the difference.

She reached behind her back and with the speed and daring seen on most old westerns, she quickly snapped back her hand, pointing her father’s gun back at him with a cold, piercing glare.

James held out his hand in a pleading manner, “No, stop baby, I didn’t mean to…you know that I…”

Before James could finish his sentence, a deafening bang echoed and hummed in his eardrums like a firecracker. He then touched his cheek and wiped away a thin trail of blood that trickled rapidly from the fresh bullet wound in his forehead. Karen released a blood-curdling scream as her husband’s eyes rolled back into their sockets and his body crumbled and buckled like a demolished building as it fell to the floor with a lifeless hollow thud. The gaping hole in the back of his head making a wet smack against the kitchen linoleum as it plopped with a thud like a dropped tomato.

A stream of thick rolling smoke wavered from the hot muzzle of the pistol that Kelly held still firm in her hand, her arm pointing forward and stiff.

The serious, stern demeanor that she had worn when her parents came in had slipped off her face like a cheap plastic Halloween mask. She no longer held the gaze of a fierce, brutal killer hell-bent on revenge, but now donned the scared, shocked guise of a frightened seventeen year-old girl.

Her mouth opened large and her eyes grew wide with overwhelming alarm. She tried to speak, tried to say anything at all, but all that came out were fragments of random syllables and incoherent guttural noises. Remnants of sounds that she could recall in a past life.

“I…I’m…I didn’t… I m-mean…” She said softly in a confused, terrified tone.

What had she really done?

Was this really what she had intended to do?

Karen fell to her knees, her manic icy shrills of terror blared as she crouched over James’s body, his eyes staring cold and lifeless into the ceiling. A large, deep trail of blood flowed out from his forehead and pooled like raspberry syrup underneath his head. Chunks and pieces resembling ground chuck were plastered across the broken glass of the kitchen cabinets and had splattered and spread onto the white of the fridge like a bloody-red pink Rorschach inkblot.

Tremors spread through Karen’s petrified body as her screams suddenly muffled themselves as she began to heave and vomit, spewing up thick sour-pinkish liquid onto the kitchen floor. She tried feverishly to stop herself, to block her mouth with her hands, to clamp shut the valve that had been thrust open, but it was no use. All her senses wailed, ached and cried out in terrible agony. Her body cursed the heavens and her skin burned as she felt herself not only lose her soft grip over herself, but also completely toss whatever control she had originally had out of the fucking window.

Words to Karen felt as foreign as another language. She sat on the floor, a futile mess of erupting and uncontrollable grief and sadness. Kelly saw her mother’s sobbing face through the somber orange glow of light still lingering from the fireplace behind her. Her eyes were tiny slits, the corners of her mouth looked as if they were being pulled down by sharp, invisible hooks. Mascara ran down Karen’s face as trails of shining black tears smeared her cheeks and Kelly could hear the sound of her mother’s snot, slurping back into her nostrils as it oozed out profusely as she wept. Makeup smeared downward and stained the soft contours of her cheekbones.

Her face had shrunken and shriveled, a grotesque facsimile of her former self as Kelly swooned towards her softly like a ghost, slowly moving closer at a steady, yet arctic pace.

“…m-mom…” She said, like a frightened child, her voice broke as she whispered to her mother.

She began to reach for her mother’s shoulder, but just as she lightly touched her shoulder, Karen snarled back at her viciously, swatting at her with sharp, gnarled claws.

“Don’t you touch me!”

Kelly fell backwards, rearing her hand back like a child scalded by a hot stove.

“Get away from me! You pathetic, sniveling excuse for a child. We clothed you, put a roof over your head. We were the ones that paid for all those fucking doctors after you started cutting on yourself. Did you ever stop and think about just how we took Katrina’s death?” She shouted, “Huh, did you!”

As her eyes penetrated through the tears, she shifted her attention back towards her dead husband. A thin stream of clear mucus ran down her nose as she sniffled, wiping her nose and tears away with her tan coat sleeve.

The corners of Kelly’s eyes began to sting as if they had just been pricked by needles as her mother’s words started chewing away at her even worse than before, continuously taking bite after bite out of her.

Her face began to tremble with unmistakable sorrow, her lower lip quivering profusely in the dim light of the room.

Karen then turned back towards her daughter, her eyes sharp with bitter hate and with a vengeful tongue, she said, “…I wish you were the one who died instead of her.”

The words felt like a dulled blade, slowly carving out her love-starved heart and emptying her like a jack-o-lantern. The thought had always been lurking in the back of her mind, hiding behind boxes of past childhood memories and other thoughts locked away secretly. Kelly had played with the notion before many times in dreams, in waking thoughts of vaporous consciousness like fog laden daydreams, that what if she were the one that died… instead of her perfect sister?

Would anyone miss her? Would they come to her grave…even on Katrina’s birthday to celebrate? Would they tell stories about her as if she were some kind of teenage martyr that missed her calling, and now hung crucified for Katrina to measure herself up to?

… No.

The world would have stopped and halted on its axis for Katrina, but it wouldn’t give even two shits for her.

Suddenly, Kelly lashed out in brutal, primal strike of unleashed emotions. She swung the butt end of the gun towards her mother’s left temple. A loud cracking sound spit out into the air as Kelly made firm contact, cracking Karen’s head open and sending her body toppling over her dead husband’s like a fresh cut tree. Blood spurt out in geysers from the wound that Kelly made in the back of Karen’s head. She continued to pummel her with the butt end of the gun, swinging the gun up, sending her arm back into the air and then swinging the gun back down with quickening speed. The act repeated itself in gruesome screams drowning out any other sound as she continued to swing the gun down in a bestial, primitive and sincere act of violent retribution.

*****

Reaching the cemetery, the lock on the gates still hung loose from when Kelly had cut it only an hour or so earlier. She swung open the gates with a forceful push as the rusted hinges squealed like swine being fed through a large meat grinder. The headlights of the car shined against the smooth surface of the headstones with a calm, resonating brilliance.

She got back into the car and drove leisurely into the cemetery. The winding roads curved and separated throughout the large plot of land like veins, sending life throughout the entire body. She drove with purpose; even in the dark, she knew exactly where she was going.

As the car made its way up the hill, the only sound she heard were the windshield wipers, screeching back and forth in the soft rain.

The car stopped next to a small mountain of dirt that sat just a few yards off the road. Kelly turned off the ignition, opened the hatchback and with two stiff pulls yanked out a large awkward bundle, wrapped in a clear plastic tarp and bound tightly together with white rope.

She managed to pull the heavy load out of the car with ease, the years of after school sports had trained her well for this, not to mention her larger athletic frame, thick calves and broad shoulders, were also quite useful, not at all like her more slender sister.

With one last pull, she dragged the large bundle next to the pile of dirt that she had formed herself hours ago. It had taken her nearly two and a half hours to uncover her sister’s grave, not to mention the thirty minutes or so it also took her to break through the concrete vault and smash through the expensive wooden coffin that her parents had bought and fussed over for her almost eight years ago.

She stared down into the grave, into the darkness of its stomach. In some twisted macabre way, it mirrored her own grave that she had dug herself – with her parents help – over the years in her mind. Day by day, they helped her dig out another shovel’s worth of dirt from the earth and helped her bury her dreams and her own personality down deep into the cold, dark abyss of the grave.

Fasting from any other thought, but from what Kat would have wanted.

She had starved down there in that grave for years, wasting away into nothing more than a walking marionette, a puppet whose tight, taught strings were directed and pulled by her parents to for one single unadulterated purpose: to resurrect their favorite daughter and to discard their least favorite, the door prize that came with the total package.

In the dark dead of night, the black that filled the grave seemed even blacker than the darkness that surrounded it. It appeared bottomless, even in the moonlight; a rectangular shaped abyss. She relaxed her vise grip on the tied end of the tarp.

Her feet mere inches away from the open edge. She crept closer towards it, underneath her toes, she could feel them curling downward, gripping the sharp angle of the black hole, pressing against the soft dirt.

There was a moment of reflection that ran across her mind like the bottom of the morning news screen in tiny, yellow print. She had dreamt and stewed over this moment for countless months, but if she was being honest, it was more like years.

She had thought about this night longer than she could recall, even before Katrina’s death. She had grown bitterly sour over the years; she was tired of how her parents compared her to her perfect sister, how her parents consistently prodded as to why she couldn’t be more like Katrina? Of even the endless bullying and ridicule that Katrina herself inflicted upon her at school in front of her friends, just for a cheap laugh.

On top of the hill, she heard the wind rush through the dry leaves that still clung desperately to the branches. She could feel it whipping through her damp hair and seep through the fabric of her damp clothes as the soft spitting rain above continued, but especially she could hear it beat against the plastic that sat near her feet whipping like a flag caught amidst a heavy wind. Her eyes now panning away from the infinite darkness of the grave and moved over to the large package that she planned to deliver to it instead.

Make a deposit, make a withdrawal, dig up one sister and now get them all.

With a step over, she bent down, pressed her shoulder against it, and placed her hands flat onto the slick, wet surface of the plastic…and pushed. She pushed with a tantalizing joy as it fell into the hole with a hard, solid thud and a muffled crunch, as Katrina’s abused and tattered corpse finally caved in underneath the weight of her dead parent’s corpses lying on top of her own.

Kelly knelt against the edge of the grave, her fingers digging deep into the wet dirt, gripping the soft earth in her palms.

For some reason, she almost expected one of them, or maybe all of them - she really wasn’t quite sure - to start moving or calling out to her, begging her for help.

Instead, Kelly stared at them from six feet above, as they just lay there helpless and motionless. They didn’t move and they didn’t speak. They just laid there on top of one another as blood pooled in the bottom of the plastic tarp like freshly cut meat from the butcher.

It had been so long that she had wanted this, so long.

Nothing existed inside the cemetery, nothing, but death: so cold, infinite and everlasting. She had wanted them all to know just what kind of pain she had felt, what kind of sorrow she carried around with her deep inside the pit of her stomach for those very long years, and now they knew.

She stood above them, erect, her knees coated softly in wet dirt. She grabbed a hold of her shovel, and without a lapse of thought or emotion, she began to fill in what was now a family plot. The dirt hit the tarp like the tight sound of a snare drum, then, as all things eventually do, the sound softened and faded away, plunging into the cold silent black of the cemetery night.

*****

The firefighters battled the wild conflagration that blazed through the multiple rooms of the house. Windows shattered and blown out, the white finish of the house burned black on the sides of each room as rolling bursts of flame scorched through the family residence.

A small, tiny crowd of onlookers and nearby neighbors had seeped out from their daily routines to admire and stare at the misfortune of the poor family’s home. Everyone stood looking at the blaze, a large bellowing cloud of thick black smoking rose from the flames like a giant gray-black serpent as it ascended high into the ether. They leaned close towards one another, whispering as they shared in desolate sorrowful tones, tales of how sad they all felt for the family, who eight years ago lost their little girl, and now this.

As the scene continued to play on over the TV screen, a Waitress: dressed in a light baby-blue servers uniform, came bustling back with the two large plates of pancakes and scrambled eggs in both hands. She sat them down on the table in front of a young girl, seventeen or eighteen, who until two days ago, had never truly existed before.

“Here ya' are hon, anything else I can get for you?”

The girl looked up at her with wide, bright brown eyes and said with a soft pleasant smile, “No thank you, I believe I have everything I need.”

The waitress smiled back at her and then left her to her meal.

She unfolded her napkin with tremendous grace as if it were made of the finest satin and placed it over her lap, then turned and stared at the stable of syrups that sat on the table at her disposal.

She looked at them wide-eyed, her face brightening as a thin, bright smile began to grow on her face.

A news reporter stood in front of the blaze and commented on how police officials have still not yet been able to contact or locate the family.

“Raspberry, Blueberry, Maple or Strawberry...what would I like?” She said, seeming to ask herself her own question.

The news reporter continued to say in a parenthetical tone, that at this moment it is still too soon to tell if anyone had been trapped inside, but at this point, the police are suspecting foul play.

As the voice of the reporter continued talking about the tragedy, the girl who sat calmly in a booth at Pete’s Diner continued to carefully and methodically, select only the right choice of syrup for her lightly buttered short stack. She grabbed the sticky bottle of Raspberry syrup and poured a hearty thick stream of syrup over her pancakes. Before she dug into them, she grabbed a sugar packet from the tray, ripped open the top with her teeth and sprinkled the white contents into her black coffee. She stared as it disappeared into the swirling, black vortex as she stirred it down deep into the bottom of the coffee mug.

“Everything disappears into the black,” she thought. “Your family, your past…even sugar.”

She had dyed her hair brown now, wore soft brown contact lenses and had even exchanged license plates from a 1994 Ford Taurus from Rhode Island that she had seen in the parking lot of the diner and slapped them on her tan Volvo.

A crooked smile crept along her bright, rejuvenated face as she relived last night’s event with fond recollection. The Brubeck family laid buried deep in six feet of wet, packed earth out in Riverview Cemetery. However, she had not just buried three members of the family, but had disposed of all four. Kelly Brubeck sat rotting at the bottom of the grave just like the rest of them, as she had done away with the pathetic, sniveling hand-me-down girl late last night in a fit of self-purging and purification.

With anticipation, she picked up her fork, sunk it deep into the soft, fluffy stack of drenched pancakes and savored a large sweet bite of the spongy flapjacks.

She was now a creature of newborn jest, clamoring with eager excitement to discover new ambitions within herself and of her own choosing, and set forth a future void of any remnants of a tortured, hollow past that she had now buried and finally laid to rest.