Autumn Killing

PART 3

Ostergotland, October

The film doesn’t stop just because I want it to.

It’s endless, and the images become more and more blurred, indistinct, grey, as their edges smoulder.

No matter what happens, they won’t catch me.

I shall defend myself.

I shall breathe.

I won’t hold back any of the rage. I shall let the young snakes, the last of them, leave my body.

I have to admit that it felt good this time. It wasn’t a sudden outburst like the first time. I knew what I was going to do. And there were a thousand reasons. I saw your face in his, Father, I saw all the boys in the schoolyard in his face. I undressed him like they undressed me, I pretended I was laying him on an altar of young snakes.

It made me calm, the violence. Happy. And utterly desperate.

The darkness is getting thicker now, the raindrops are balls of lead crashing onto the ground, onto the people.

It’s my turn now. I’m the most powerful.

No one will ever again be able to turn away from me. And who really needs those pigs with their traditions, names, the sense of superiority they acquire at birth. The pictures flicker, black and white with pale yellow numbers. The story of me, the one firing out of the projector, is approaching its end now.

But I am still here.

Father embraces me again in the pictures, and he’s thin, and Mum won’t survive the cancer for much longer. Come to me, son, stand still so I can hit you.

I have a friend.

It’s possible to escape loneliness, captivity. The strangers and the fear, all the things that are unbearable. Life can be a blue, mirror-calm sea.

Money.

Everything costs.

Has a price.

The boy sitting in the garden in the pictures on the white projector-screen doesn’t know that yet, but he has a sense of it.

Money. It should have been my turn.

Father, you have no money. You never have had. But why shouldn’t I? Your bitterness isn’t mine, and maybe we could have done something together, something good.

But things went the way they went.

A rented flat, a terraced house, feeble little abodes.

I am running alone through the garden in the pictures. The devil take anyone who creates loneliness, and the fear that comes with it.

The devil take them.

Boys. Living and dead, men with skins to try to fit into.

Then the reel ends. The projector flashes white. Neither the boy nor the man is visible any longer.

Where should I go now? I’m scared and alone, a person who doesn’t exist in any pictures. All that is left is the feeling of young snakes crawling beneath my skin.