Cool Cactus # 6
You know the question I get most often? I mean, besides “Please, please don’t kill me” (which really isn’t a question anyway. The question I get asked most often is why did I choose the life I lead? What made me become a supervillain? And the answer is really quite simple. I did it for her.
You see, when I was just a boy, something terrible happened to my older sister. She was running in the park, near dusk, like she always did, when she was grabbed from behind and dragged into the bushes. My parents refused to tell me any details, but I knew it was something horrible. The police eventually caught the guy, and he went to prison. But that wasn’t good enough – not for me. The attack on my sister woke something terrible in me. I was only 12 when the parole board let him out. I remember my sister being in tears. But those bureaucrats in their white shirts and black ties said he’d been rehabilitated. I knew better. I’d been doing reading. Those kinds of people never get better.
They didn’t have the sex offender registry back then, but if you were resourceful, you could find out where an ex-con lived. And I did. What can I say, I was a precocious kid.
I took my dad’s gun and I snuck out of the house late one night. I knew he liked to drink at O’Mally’s pub, and then take a back alley home to the hovel that was all an ex-con could rent. I waited for him in a dumpster, surrounded by the putrid filth generated by the poorer neighborhoods of a city and when he came stumbling by, I rose out of the trash and shot him in the back.
I thought it would be hard. But it wasn’t. The gun jumped in my hand, which scared me a bit and caused me to fire again. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t see his eyes when I first shot him that made it easier. But I stared into them as he lay there, instantly sober. I saw the fear in his eyes as his blood pumped out onto the dirty asphalt, and I felt good. Maybe now he knew how my sister felt. And it was that thought that led me to the coup de gras. Staring deep into eyes as I stood over him, I aimed the gun down toward my feet said “This is for Donna” and fired a final shot, right into his groin.
That was the only time he screamed.
And that was what brought me back to reality. I dropped the gun and ran.
It didn’t take the cops long to show up at our door. I made a tearful confession and threw myself into Donna’s arm, weeping. She hugged me fiercely and whispered something in my ear before the cops took me away.
Given the circumstances, I was only given a year in juvie. The psychiatrist said I’d been scarred by the incident with my sister and I just needed some time for examination. Back then, the psychiatric defense wasn’t used so often, so the judge was more sympathetic. Furthermore, it turned out the guy had attacked another woman the night before.
In those long dark nights, as I listened to the other troubled boys, two thoughts kept me going. First, I thought about how good it felt to get my revenge. And I plotted to get the bastards on the parole board who’d let that monster go free.
And the other thing that kept me sane were the whispered words my sister spoke to me before I was ripped from the home I loved.
“Thank you.”
You see, when I was just a boy, something terrible happened to my older sister. She was running in the park, near dusk, like she always did, when she was grabbed from behind and dragged into the bushes. My parents refused to tell me any details, but I knew it was something horrible. The police eventually caught the guy, and he went to prison. But that wasn’t good enough – not for me. The attack on my sister woke something terrible in me. I was only 12 when the parole board let him out. I remember my sister being in tears. But those bureaucrats in their white shirts and black ties said he’d been rehabilitated. I knew better. I’d been doing reading. Those kinds of people never get better.
They didn’t have the sex offender registry back then, but if you were resourceful, you could find out where an ex-con lived. And I did. What can I say, I was a precocious kid.
I took my dad’s gun and I snuck out of the house late one night. I knew he liked to drink at O’Mally’s pub, and then take a back alley home to the hovel that was all an ex-con could rent. I waited for him in a dumpster, surrounded by the putrid filth generated by the poorer neighborhoods of a city and when he came stumbling by, I rose out of the trash and shot him in the back.
I thought it would be hard. But it wasn’t. The gun jumped in my hand, which scared me a bit and caused me to fire again. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t see his eyes when I first shot him that made it easier. But I stared into them as he lay there, instantly sober. I saw the fear in his eyes as his blood pumped out onto the dirty asphalt, and I felt good. Maybe now he knew how my sister felt. And it was that thought that led me to the coup de gras. Staring deep into eyes as I stood over him, I aimed the gun down toward my feet said “This is for Donna” and fired a final shot, right into his groin.
That was the only time he screamed.
And that was what brought me back to reality. I dropped the gun and ran.
It didn’t take the cops long to show up at our door. I made a tearful confession and threw myself into Donna’s arm, weeping. She hugged me fiercely and whispered something in my ear before the cops took me away.
Given the circumstances, I was only given a year in juvie. The psychiatrist said I’d been scarred by the incident with my sister and I just needed some time for examination. Back then, the psychiatric defense wasn’t used so often, so the judge was more sympathetic. Furthermore, it turned out the guy had attacked another woman the night before.
In those long dark nights, as I listened to the other troubled boys, two thoughts kept me going. First, I thought about how good it felt to get my revenge. And I plotted to get the bastards on the parole board who’d let that monster go free.
And the other thing that kept me sane were the whispered words my sister spoke to me before I was ripped from the home I loved.
“Thank you.”
posted by Cool Cactus at 12:24 PM
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