Postcard #2: Response 2

Postcard #2: Response 1

Postcard #1: Response 2

Journal Entry: #3

She was dead. Or at least that's what I had to pretend. Every time I saw her, I told myself that it was just a ghost, a shadow of her before she went into darkness forever. It probably sounds terrible, and I'm sure there are certainly less damaging ways to try to forget a person you've loved, but I've tried to, over so many months and in so many ways. This is the only one that seemed to work at all.

It's probably because I swore I'd never let her go, til the day she died, and probably not even then. I find it a little funny now, in a sad sort of way, that my heart and mind took my promise so seriously.

I can understand why. They must have loved her just as furiously as the rest of me did.

Journal Entry: #2

" The marvelous thing is that it is painless," he said. "Committing conscious suicide so that the only world you live in is your own, the one locked up in your head- that's the best kind of self-murder that there'll ever be." I think he would've been right; for any other person, living only in a mental world of their own imagination and creation.....hell, that would be a dream. The problem wasn't with what the Doctor had offered me- the problem would, in fact, turn out to be with me.

No, that doesn't sound right, blaming the whole thing on me, that's ridiculous- no one human would be capable of such power, and certainly not me, weak-willed as I was. The problem lay both with me and with the circumstances in which I grew up. I might have turned out quite ordinary, really, if it hadn't been for two people.

Many years after my physical being had been completed, my consciousness finally awoke, and I found myself in the hands of two monsters trying to love. I was their slave for twenty-five years.

Journey Entry: #1

To me, the most profound divide in the world was the forced distance that humans put between themselves, with  their fabricated, genetically modified polyster world, and the natural order of things- the animalistic inner urges of survival of the fittest.

Murder Mystery: Final Copy

           

            

            My name is Hugo Delaceur.

            Last night was my 27th birthday. I have been in love with my wife, Sylvie, since I was nine years old.

             Last night, she was murdered.

            I first met Sylvie when my parents sent me to boarding school in the English countryside. I was a very quiet and withdrawn child- I preferred art over company, stories in books over real adventures outside.  I came from a family that never made any pretence of being happy or well-functioning. I had one brother, several years older, who never acknowledged me long enough to allow me any presence in his life, nor him in mine. My father was a man who believed discipline was laid down in fists, not words, and my mother was a hypochondriac who rarely left her room, and never let me embrace her for fear I'd give her that terrible sniffling cold that all children seem to be constantly afflicted with. At that point, the only love I'd felt was from my nanny, a warm woman from Jamaica- being a sea away from France and from her caused me to go mute for my first three months of school. Enrolling in a new all-boys school as a pale knobbly-kneed mute with a deep appreciation for culture, and a loathing of sports, meant I was immediately extremely unpopular. I ate my lunches sitting alone by the edge of the school grounds, by the forest, and I was taunted by school mates for refusing to communicate in any way other than writing notes. For three months, I spent every night with silent, hot tears burning down my cheek and searing a hole in my worn out cotton pillow.

            Then I met Sylvie. It was at a school dance held by a neighboring all-girls school, and I had never seen so many shiny, bouncing dolls before. All the girls had their hair curled tightly, and wore pastel dresses and the barest touch of blush.  Sylvie was not the prettiest one, nor the most graceful, but she was the loudest, happiest and most mischievous person I had ever met. She grabbed my hand to dance, and spent the rest of the night coaxing me further and further out of my shell, yelling over the music- questions about my home, favorite foods, favorite movies, questions about anything and everything.  By 10 o'clock, we had our first kiss.

            From then on until our final year of school, we'd see each other every three or four months when our schools would combine for special events. By the time we were seventeen, we would take weekends trips into town together, talking nights away in dingy motels and eating nothing but fish and chips. By eighteen we had graduated. We spent four years in dead-end jobs, only feeling alive through drunken weekends and late night talks, barely surviving in the apartment we shared with two other people. After a very public nervous breakdown I had at my final job at a grocery store, we decided to take a holiday, just like we had dreamed of when we were kids. We borrowed money from our flatmates, knowing full well we would never pay them back, and then we spent 58 glorious months in Japan, Russia, Greece, everywhere and anywhere, bouncing from place to place. With every new trip, our happiness and aspirations grew larger and larger. It all feels dream-like now- it seems so impossible that we ever survived for so long on so little, like we were breaking some unspoken cardinal rule of the world by managing to be so goddamn happy even though we had nothing. I never cared where I was as long as it was by her side. Every country we traveled through brought a different soft smile to her face, and each experience made her eyes shine brighter with wonder and childlike appreciation, until catching her gaze felt like looking straight at a blinding God. Sylvie cast a rose-tinted fog on me and my perception of our surroundings, so things as simple as breathing felt enchanted, and standing in rain felt like paradise. We were married during our 3rd year of holiday, in a jungle in India, and returned to England, to London, in our 5th year, when news of Sylvie's mother arrived.

             The woman had died of breast cancer and Sylvie inherited her house and savings. Sylvie always told me she was wild because she had never had a parent around long enough to tame her- she was shipped around from her fathers' to her mothers' until they finally sent her to boarding school. We decorated the house with royal blue silk from our trip to China, wrought-iron chairs that looked like they were made of intertwining branches and  leaves, and imported Italian marble countertops. Everything was soft and fresh and smelled of mint tea and lavender cakes. It was our human heaven.

            Last night, we hosted a dinner party in our new house. It was to celebrate my 27th birthday. Sylvie had sent the invites, and I didn't argue with her choice of guests, though I knew she was having an affair with two of the men. One of them, Frank Stoakes, disliked me immensely and wanted Sylvie to leave me and follow him to America- I'd overheard their telephone argument three weeks prior. During the whole dinner, he sat across from me and grinned at me like I imagine a demonic fox would smile at its prey, after it has cornered a rabbit, just before it bites into the tender beating neck. A smile that says 'I'm going to kill you, and I'm going to enjoy it'. Frank Stoakes' fat wife sat next to him, a woman with fluorescent lipstick who had huge reflective eyes that seemed to suck up everything around her. I ignored both of them by concentrating on Sylvie's cousin who was sitting next to me, a lovely large girl with blue-black hair, who looked like a horse when she laughed.

            The other attendee that Sylvie was sleeping with was my best friend from boarding school, Charlie. I knew they had started their relationship just after we had graduated and moved in together, but I still felt bad for him, not me. He had fallen in love with her, and desperately wanted her- but I was his best mate. He was always a solid fellow which is most likely why he felt guilty to his core about hurting me. Charlie was so confused and conflicted by the entire situation that he'd become depressed, barely eating or sleeping and only finding solace in the bottoms of bottles. So there he sat on the opposite site of the table, shooting me worried little smiles, his forehead furrowed on his pale, hollow face.

            By 1 am, most people had tired of the tableau of screeching laughter and gentle drunken mocking. They retired to our guestrooms, ready to sleep off the liquor. By 2 am, we were asleep in our rooms, a collective breeze of snores circulating round the house. By 3 am, Sylvie snuck out of bed and tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen. In thirty minutes, she was face-down in a pool of cooling sticky crimson.

            Who did it? That is the only true question that remains. Was it Frank, a man enraged by her refusal to leave me, furious that an imp like me should possess the one pretty thing he could not have, did he creep down the stairs when he heard a door creak open, in the hopes he would catch me and kill me, and instead, did he kill her in his anger? Was it Charlie, a gentle man who has been played a fool, who has finally stooped so low that he has cracked? Perhaps Ms. Stoakes, finally catching a glimpse of some heavy look between my wife and Frank, and taking her revenge and dignity in one fell swoop of a blade?

            I killed her. I snuck down the burgundy-carpeted stairs of the house we had built together, I stood behind her in the kitchen as she drank leftover champagne from the dinner, wearing a humming-bird embroidered kimono I'd bought for her during our travels to Japan, and I slit her throat with one of our stainless steel knives.

I knew about her vices, but I didn't mind any of them, the affairs, the smoking, the lavish lifestyle. I didn't kill her for any of that, I loved her in spite of those flaws. Hell, they made me love her anymore- they were there to remind me she was still human, still nothing more than a sack of skin stretched over emotions, just as we all are.

            I did it because she lost that special indefinable quality that she had. The spark in her eyes, her love of life, was gone- she seemed to be going through all the motions without feeling or thinking...anything. Her words fell flat as soon as they slipped out of her mouth, they were limp and lifeless and no longer embraced me in a cloud of love. She had, over the months and without me noticing, become normal. She had become just as dull and ordinary as the rest of them, she no longer challenged anything or risked anything just to show she was in control. The huge FUCK YOU she had tattooed on her brain and each individual thought, it had disintegrated. Sylvie had become nothing more than a hollow shell, a doll skipping and dancing around pretending to be the girl I love. It was like living with a terrifying caricature of a dead person, curled up next to me in bed, drinking coffee across from me at the breakfast table, grasping my hand with her cold, grubby claws as we walked down streets.

            I couldn't let her live like that. It was horrible, watching a wounded animal limp around, simultaneously struggling for death and breath. I had to put her out of her misery. I couldn't let Sylvie go on in such a tortured existence, with a caged soul and a marble heart.

            I killed her, and as I stood behind her shaking body, watching the burgundy pour out of her and pool on the countertops, our countertops, I  knew I was watching my own life pour out from within her. Watching her essence fade away meant seeing and feeling my own soul die.

            I am writing this to inform you, Constable Jenkins, so I may clear all suspects, and consequentially my conscience. Your police force will find us at 3143 West Boulevard, and our bodies are in the attic by the first window. Please tell my brother to bury my body next to Sylvie's.

                                    Goodbye,

                                                                                    Hugo Delaceur