I just killed someone.
I know you can’t quite tell, but that's because I washed all the blood off my hands. Like Lady Macbeth.
The knife was just there.
The person I killed was a useless old bum on the street - like me, only a bit filthier and with a knack for begging that I never had.
So the knife was just there and it was dark and you were all gone and I stuck it in his gut and pulled it out again, took his little plastic coke bottle with the top cut off that all his coins were in, and went to hang out under the bridge.
Like a troll.
My sunglasses are broken in the middle. They're not really my sunglasses. They're my girlfriend's. I borrow ‘em sometimes when she’s not looking, but she’s here now and she’s not so impressed.
‘Jeeze, Lee, what’ve you gone and done now.’
‘Killed a bum,’ I mumble. ‘Needed the dosh.’
‘You didn’t,’ she says angrily.
I’ve never killed anyone before. I’m starting to feel a bit guilty. Maybe I didn’t really need the dosh, you know?
‘I killed him stone dead and took his coke bottle.’ I start crying. ‘I’m sorry!’ I’m a bad person.
‘Well where’s the cash then, huh?’
‘Must’ve dropped it…’
Maybe there was no coke bottle. Maybe I’m confused like Raskolnikoff. Raskolnikoff didn’t take anything from the moneylender when he killed her. He had a fever afterwards, and he was confused. Maybe getting rid of the bum just made life easier for someone else, if not for me. It was the right thing to do.
‘Lee! There was no cash.’
‘No…but it was the right thing to do. Have I got a fever?’
‘No.’
She’s got her mobile out and she’s calling someone and I know she’s going to dob me in. I should kill her, but Raskolnikoff wouldn’t have killed Sonia.
They put me in an interrogation room. I look for the bottle but it’s not there. The cops must’ve confiscated it as evidence when they took me in. I don’t remember what happened to it, guess I got distracted by the siren.
Shit, now they’ll make me do a court case. I hate court cases. All that yes your honour and no your honour and an uppity jury who half the time made up their minds the minute they saw the defendant looked a bit scruffy.
A woman in a suit comes in, and my girlfriend is behind her. ‘I want to represent myself,’ I say. ‘I used to be a qualified barrister, you know.’
‘I see…’ she frowns at a clipboard. ‘He was working up until last month,’ my girlfriend adds. Her mascara has gone all smudgy over her face and she looks a bit like Alice Cooper.
‘I seem to have forgotten, but was there any cash in the bottle? Or did I do it for more noble causes?’ Am I Dmitri Karamazov? Or am I Raskolnikoff? Or maybe…
‘I was framed!’
‘And who do you think framed you?’ says the woman in the suit.
‘Smerdyakov, the bastard. Of course he’d have wanted the cash. I wanted it too, but I’d never have killed another homeless bum like me. He knew they’d pin all this on me.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ says my girlfriend. I guess it’s fitting that she starts praying. I know they don’t send people to Sibera these days but I imagine if they find me guilty it’ll still be the inside of a prison cell for months.
‘Where did you find him?’ the woman asks my girlfriend.
‘Find him? I didn’t have to find him. He’s been at home the last three weeks. I noticed he’d been a bit quiet but I’m at work all day, and he’d been really stressed at work before he quit. I know there’s some family history of psychosis on his mother’s side, but he’s never had an episode before, not in the four years we’ve been together.’
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Word count: 664
I admit to cheating because I don't think this really fits the challenge. Maybe I'll try again later :)
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