5.24.2010
5.15.2010
Overkill Issue #9 - "On A Boat" cover by Zack Price, '11, and Patrick Wysor, '09
5.11.2010
Overkill #9 - Original Poetry by Maggie Rich, '11
5.10.2010
Overkill #9 - Original Prose Poetry by Dave Valentine, '10
Change
"And then, just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, it became a butterfly." - Chinese Proverb
He did not remember the last time he'd seen sunlight. Perhaps it had been weeks. Perhaps days. Months. Perhaps years. He didn't, to be honest, have a very good memory. He preferred to lie here in his darkness and warmth and security, and not worry about the world outside and around.
He heard things, though. He heard cars passing by below and dogs barking, and occasionally the television of the man who lived in the room next to him would give him updates on world events, and if he'd felt like listening he might have learned that the fishing industry off the coast of Japan was in trouble because of giant jellyfish, or that in the forests of the Amazon was discovered a frog whose skin juices might someday be used to cure cancer. Of if he'd listen to the man in the room next to him talking to Sunday visitors, he might have learned that the tree outside of the man's window was an oak tree. He didn't listen, though, so he didn't know any of these things.
Sometimes, when storms came and went, he grew fearful because he thought his walls and ceiling might simply fall away and leave him helpless, open to everything and everyone and the world would be too big for him to ever manage. But this hadn't happened yet, so he was being optimistic about the rest of his existence.
He wasn't sure why he had first decided to shut himself away from everything else. It had simply seemed as though he had no other option. He might have missed things from before his isolation and confinement, but, again, his memory was so poor that such a possibility really wasn't an issue.
One day, though, he heard something very loud. And very close. An earthquake, he thought at first, an earthquake come to swallow us all and shit if I can't do anything about it. He would have liked to dismiss the idea as soon as it came to him, but the evidence continued to mount. The entire world seemed to be falling apart. The cracking sound continued and grew louder until he thought his ears would rupture and blood cover the walls of his room, the walls that now shifted dangerously, and something seemed to beat against them like a tornado outside, but he could have sworn it was coming from the inside, inside with him, but that couldn't be, and then, amongst all of this, a piercing, blinding light penetrated his walls and hurt his eyes and flooded his tiny room, and then it grew bigger and bigger, and he thought for sure this was the Ragnarök and that everything was ending and the light was that from the other end of the tunnel, and well it was a good run, wasn't it, in his tiny room in the dark.
Overkill #9 - Original Fiction by Erica Belden, '10
Arson and Carrots
"What are you going to do now?"
"I don't know"
"You can't just leave me here, you're not anonymous anymore."
"I know!"
"So what are you going to do?"
"I don't know. I don't know. I DON'T KNOW!"
"Your temper isn't going to help anything."
"Shut up! Shut up! You're dead! You don't talk!" I stretched my leg out and kicked her. This was so cliche. Bodies only talk in movies. But I guess the only thing holding me in reality was the feeling of cabinet doors digging into my back.
"You don't even look like me. Who would believe you're my daughter?"
"I don't know. Damn it Tammy, maybe I was adopted! Not like you have any say in the matter. You're just laundry now as far as anyone is concerned."
With that I stood up and scooped her (and all of her linens) into my arms. I would put her in her Jeep and figure out what to do with her when I was far away from this place. But it was terribly hot out, and her kitchen was a disaster. The whole neighborhood would be smelling her by the time I could leave if I left her in the Jeep.
I took her to the living room and set her on the couch.
"You know the mechanic closes at five."
She was right. I didn't have time to clean up anyway. If I wanted to make a convincing escape I had to leave by 4:30 in her Jeep, with her body, my car, and what was left of your bones in tow. You would have thought this was hilarious.
-----
I stood up and wiped the oil off of my face. "What are you laughing at?!"
"Your face," you spat out between guffaws.
"I did what you told me to!"
"Well you obviously did it wrong." I wiped my face on your shirt. "Hey, this was new!"
"Whatever." The oil made a slow path across the cement floor. "You're cleaning that up, this is your fault."
"Hell no I'm not! You didn't have to be an idiot about it. Why would you let the oil out straight onto your face?" you asked, stifling another giggle. "You got yourself into this mess, you clean it up."
-----
Your words echoed in my head, or in the kitchen. I wasn't sure which. Like with the oil, I had to be creative here.
I hated to always be setting things on fire, but I had no other ideas. It dawned on me then that it was finite creativity more than anything that doomed a serial killer.
Am I a serial killer? I don't like to think that I am. Sure, I've killed either 3 or 23 people (God knows if there were people in that diner, or if I was actually even there). If it's the former, I think I still fall in the category of murderer. If it's the latter, then I would probably be considered a mass murderer, which sounds less scary. A mass murderer kills your government officials. A serial killer waits in your bedroom until you're safely tucked in.
In any case, I didn't have much time. How do I start a house fire without it looking like arson? Realistically, it didn't need to be a big fire. Just enough that the bloody mess I made would conveniently disappear. Fortunately for me, I had opted to make this bloody mess in the kitchen, so I didn't have to set up her bedroom for some candle-riddled rendez-vous or something awkward like that. No, all I had to do was start dinner.
In retrospect, I suppose it didn't matter what I put in the large soup pot I found in a cabinet next to the oven. However, I was so nervous that some bit of my soup would survive the fire that I couldn't stand to make it out of whole carrots and leftover cereal, which was what I found first.
Instead, I peeled and cut up the carrots and some potatoes too, and put them in the pot with all of the meat in her freezer. I'm not sure if meat cooks in boiling water (I can't cook) but I know it cooks in fire, and by the time anyone sees it, it will be done cajun-style.
Now to start this fire...I thought about putting a towel between the burner and the pot, but I wasn't sure if that would work. I needed something that would start for certain and be hard to stop...a grease fire! But where would I get grease?
I made bacon and knocked it over.
Well this was hardly believable. Why would I be making bacon and a stew at the same time? I guess that didn't matter, but how would it get knocked over when nobody was home?
Where was that cat?
I found him in the living room, curled up asleep on top of some sheets and his dead owner. "Heeeere kitty kitty..." I cooed, holding a piece of bacon out as an offering. He stretched and came over to me; I snatched him up before he had a chance to run off.
After making sure it wouldn't burn him, I set his paws down in the spilled bacon grease. He struggled mildly as I opened a nearby window and tossed him out. Giving me an alarmed meow, he took off into the backyard. Sorry, kitty.
It appeared that the bacon puddle was accessible from the window I threw the cat out of. I grabbed a lighter, a red one with a long black neck, and went to pack up my dead surrogate mother.
____________________________
I had watched you hitch a boat trailer to your truck enough times to know what I was doing. It was a good thing she drove a Jeep; they're built for this kind of thing.
The pastel-coated steak of a golfer emerged from a house nearby, this time heading toward his Mercedes with a whole bag of clubs. He set them down when he saw me.
"Do you need help with that?"
"No I'm good thanks" I replied, standing up and wiping the sweat off my face with the back of my arm.
Remember The Stranger by Camus, where the main character kills a man because it's too hot outside? I finally understood why.
I was in the Jeep with the motor running before he could say anything further. The damn thing was a stick shift, which I hadn't driven since my friend tried to teach me how a few summers ago.
My friends. I remembered them all. Their faces, their voices, their eye colors and their birthdays. I wondered if any of them had tried to get in touch with me after you and I disappeared. I'd imagine a few did, but I don't think I'm the kind of person you keep looking for. I was sure it had been weeks, at least, since any of them had thought of me.
I pushed the clutch and started down the street. Everything about this Jeep felt weird to me, from how high I sat to the weight of my car in the back to the fuzzy blue cover on the steering wheel. Everything seemed unnatural. I suppose it was only fitting; if I'm pretending to be someone else, the more things that are out of character, the better.
I had originally planned to set Tammy's house on fire right around five, when she would likely be getting off of the job I said she had and I might still be at the mechanic. Now though, it seemed too suspicious. That golfer would see right through it. First a new-found daughter, then a house fire, and then...well it was just too obvious. I had to think of something else.
I tried to turn as little as possible, to be able to return to her house. And because I'm not exactly the best at driving large conglomerations of vehicles, but that's beside the point. After fifteen or twenty minutes, or maybe several hours, I came to a Wal-Mart. What better place to abandon a car for a few days? Car unhitched, I retraced my path and went...home.
The next week went by in a blur. Every morning I would get up at seven, shower and brush my teeth (one of the benefits of house-sitting for someone you murdered is the free access to warm running water) and be out of the house by 7:45. I'd stay out until five, pacing grocery stores and loitering in bookstores. Anything to kill time. At night I'd watch television and try not to think about the continually worsening smell that oozed out of the laundry room.
Eating was difficult. The kitchen was sticky and smelled kind of like rot, but different than what I had, sadly, become accustomed to. This was not only Tammy decaying in the laundry room, but also the bits of her that were stuck to the cabinets, and everything I had taken out of the fridge to accommodate the large pot of carrots and raw meat, which also smelled. Coupled with the bacon grease (which I would have to add to before I left for good), it won the prize for the most unappetizing smell ever.
This went on for about a week. I continued the eight-to-five routine, even through the weekend. People could just assume she worked then or was out running errands, and I had no idea what day it was, anyway.
And then it was time. I woke up at seven, took a shower, brushed my teeth. I made myself breakfast: two eggs, over-easy. A side of bacon and a glass and a half of white grape juice. I tipped the frying pan on its side and made an awful mess of the stove before washing my hands and gathering my things. Well, her things really. Her cell phone, her purse, her keys, her body.
I wasn't sure if what I did next would work, but I couldn't think of any other reasonable option. I went to a gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes. For the next couple hours, I sat behind an abandoned building and smoked as many of them as I could. Having never been a smoker, I coughed, and then I puked, and then I coughed some more and passed out. Apparently it is possible to overdose on nicotine.
When I woke up, the pavement around me was sweltering, and I was so dizzy. I let out a nauseous "ugh" and just like I had hoped, my voice sounded husky, older, and not like mine. I sidled up the wall of the building and regained my balance. Was I ready to do this? I guess I didn't really have a choice.
Driving through her neighborhood, it appeared that I had chosen a weekday; cars were missing and garages were closed all down her street. I parked about three blocks from her house and went to do the deed.
I had just barely started driving away when her cell phone started ringing.
"Hello?"
"Is this Ms. Tamara Lowalter?"
Lowalter. "Speaking?"
"This is the Jameson County Fire Department."
"Oh my God."
Overkill #9 - Nonfiction by Katie McHugh, '13
(“I can’t prove this makes any sense, but I sure hope that it does.”)
Before I began writing and drawing, I immersed myself in music. And I’m not talking about tinkering on the plastic keys of some electronic piano or cutting my fingers on guitar strings…nah, that came years later, and not very far.
Why it’s so hard to write about music: It came before language. Before I could speak well, there was the car radio and WDVE. A child can’t articulate the deep senses of wonder thrumming through her, can’t take separate things like hot, clear skies and luminescent leaves of grass, and tie them together into a fitting frame of reference. Expanses and pieces of beauty assure her, though, of a larger world than herself, one she’ll join soon, someday. The child knows she contains multitudes because bigger things than her tell her so.
Led Zeppelin was the music of my kidhood. Next came U2. Rush after them. But Led Zeppelin:
When you’re eight years old and listening to the layered lyrics of “Ramble On” on the radio, your comprehension skills, so valued in the standardized classroom, are put on hold. I guess some people, listening through all of the CDs for the first time, wonder how one band could sing themselves hoarse in “Heartbreaker,” then, on the same track, switch to the jaded, jaunty “Livin’, Lovin’ Maid,” and then traipse onto “Stairway to Heaven” and rattle through “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Ramble On.” It’s not hard to figure out, though. They’ve just found out how to fully express their range of comprehension. They created and defined their external frame of reference. Each song is the crystallization of several emotions, thoughts, fantasies, impressions, memories…
When you’re ten years old and laying in bed during a hot May night, and you can’t imagine yourself anywhere else but school, school, and more school, you wrap your headphones cords around your fingers and snap shut the flimsy jaw of your cassette player. First there is the moment of sacred silence before you press PLAY. Headphones encircle your head; you crush one foam disc painfully against the pillow, sinking into a reverie. The button clicks and suddenly Bono is howling, singing U2’s unusual brand of dignified anguish. They are searching. So are you. Their songs are thrillingly spiritual: you have no understanding of God except for what you cannot express, but these guys introduce you to expanses of the soul you never thought to tread. They lift up your days and light up your nights.
When you’re twelve years old and crammed into a yellow cattle car every morning and afternoon, jolting along home and bruising your knees against the hard seat in front of you, there’s the electric trill and thin falsetto of Rush to make the long ride worthwhile. The only way to handle this kind of music is to throw open your windows at home and turn up the stereo as loud as you can. Nothing can contain the spirit of the radio. You just let it permeate the still, cool atmosphere of a late March afternoon. Rush is really something else, you think. They even quote Shakespeare, whose glorious sonnets are finally becoming clear after months of unknowing readings, like a muddied creek shining clear after a few hours of peace. One kind of music leads to another.
About five or six years later, I got a four disc set of Led Zeppelin that had most of their songs on it. I’d tap on the CD player until it worked, and I’d lie on my floor and listen. Sound filled the room. I just lay there. Joy by osmosis. Yeah. I guess that’s all what listening to music really is. You are what you absorb. Maybe, if you rewind the tapes enough times.
—Katie McHugh
