Sunday, January 24, 2010

Before they invented the air guns to shoot bolts into the skulls of the poor stupid animals, you had to use a sledgehammer. Thats what my daddy did. All day long he'd stand at the end of a ramp, a cow would come down it, and he'd swing his hammer and bash it's head in. He claimed he was really good at it, that he never had to hit one on the head twice. Of course I never knew what my daddy did to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach until I was much older. All I knew about the slaughterhouse was the smell. When daddy came home at night, he reeked of it. I never forgot that smell because it never left him. Even on the days when he wasn't working and stayed home to look after ma and me, that mix of old blood and dirt was always there. My daddy smelled like death.
When I was thirteen, daddy took me to work with him. I was never sure why, he just said I was going to stay home from school and come see what he did everyday. So I went.
I'll never forget the smell. It was the same stench daddy had on him everyday, but it was overpowering. Outside the rusted metal building there was a steer yard, where the animals milled around, eating, shitting. Not knowing they were going to die very soon.
There were men in the yard that ushered the cows up the ramp, I watched them as we went in. I had been told that daddy killed cows for a living, and I was quite curious as to how he did it. The only thing that was making me sick was the smell.
Inside the building, it was dark except for the windows up high that let in light. Daddy walked me towards a ramp and I watched as he talked with the night shift worker that he was replacing. The man handed him a large hammer and then walked away, out of the building.
The first cow came walking down the ramp and daddy raised the sledgehammer high up in the air, when it got down to the bottom and stood staring at him with those stupid uncomprehending eyes, he brought the brought the hammer down and smashed it's skull in. A man with larger muscles than my daddy (which were very large) pulled the dead animal onto a conveyor belt in the floor and it moved away to a different part of the slaughterhouse, to be cut apart.
As I watched it pull away, another cow was already coming down, ready to have it's head bashed in...
Driving back to the house after the work day was over, I didn't say anything to daddy, and he didn't say anything to me. I wasn't really disturbed by what I had seen. I kind of liked it. I wanted more of it but I was afraid to ask daddy if I could get a job in the slaughterhouse. Daddy didn't like his job at all, but he was good at it. I'd have to find some other way to satisfy my urge to kill....

You'll find the next body in the basement of Kelner Elementary school. I've left some very obvious clues this time, I really do hope you catch me. I'm actually quite sick of killing people, but it's an addiction that's hard to stop. I've been doing it since I was thirteen. But I'm not just going to turn myself in, that would be too easy. I want to at least have some fun stringing you guys along.
Peace and Love,
The Butcher

Ps. The little girl's name was Susan and she had brown hair put up in pigtails. and she screamed for her mommy when I brought the hammer down. The sound of her head smashing open made me jizz. Tell her mommy she owes me some new pants.

4 comments:

Justin said...

I must say, this story has power. Your stuff has a level of appeal I've never seen from any writer. Seriously, I'm not just saying that. Your stories deserve a far wider audience.

Kurdt said...

Thanks! I'll try to get some more stuff up this week, I've been on a movie kick and haven't had much time for anything else outside of work.

Justin said...

Haha why are we so obsessed with movies?? It's such a beautiful medium. I recommend to you Rick Trembles' "Motion Picture Purgatory" books. It's the insane cartoonist's comic-strip reviews of movies.

Word varification: "snard".

Kurdt said...

Thanks for the rec! I'll have to check it out, it sounds like my sort of thing.

One of the reasons I love film is because even though it's a relatively new medium, it already has a long and storied history. There's so much you can get into, so many avenues you can go down. There's always another movie I end up watching that I've never heard of that lets me learn something new. It's like windows into other worlds, and it saddens me sometimes that people take it so much for granted.

But of course I spent last night watching Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders that featured a sentient race of living shit people, so maybe I'm just being naive...