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  I woke up today because of the whispering, the mumbling in my head. It felt like a radio turning up louder and louder in my head, except it was my voice, or someone’s voice. Then I wake up, except it didn’t stop. The thing is I’m not okay. I don’t feel right. I don’t feel the same. Like I did yesterday. Like I did the day before that. Everything around me is red. Not red in the form of color, red in the form of blood. I woke up with this urge to hurt, tear, break everything around me. All I see is blood. My life before is simple, a good job, a girl, a house. My wife, not official yet, she’s wrapping her arm around me asking me if I had a nightmare. It was all a dream. Her lips grazing the back of my neck, warm breath. Her hair emitting that odor that can only be hers. Asking me why I’m being so quiet, so serious, so distant. She’s asking me this all morning. She doesn’t realize that she’s red, that she’s blood, going to be blood. I don’t look at her once, I know she’d be just as red as everything else, and I leave. Why is she crying? Doesn’t she know I love her? Everything around me needs to burn. It’s funny you wake up one morning, the same way you wake up every other morning except everything is twisted, upside down, broken. Everything becomes pointless, why do I even have a job, so I can pay my way into debt, so I can exhaust my body and mind just to sleep in a bed every night? Just to be able to say, “Yeah I have a job, yeah I’ve got a house, I’m married. Everything is how it’s supposed to be. Life is at its peak.” Stop lying to me.
  I drive to work in the used car I call my own. It smells like a nicotine addict spent a lot of his time stinking up my car. Funny I can smell the previous owner’s smoking habit. I picture him inhaling all that smoke, burning his lungs, I envy him. My radio is buzzing, picking up nothing, so I shut it off. Joke’s on me. the buzzing is in my head, and it won’t stop getting louder and louder. I try and make my own music in my head.
  “It’s alright.”
  “You’ll be fine.”
  Those are the lyrics. I try and sort all the buzzing and distortion and whispering and broken words. I imagine some beat, and some instruments thrown into it all, I try to sort it out. All I see is blood. I’m a musician all of the sudden. I wish life was less realistic, I wish a garbage truck would run a red light at the intersection I’m crossing right now. I wish it was going well over the speed limit and I wish it would smash me, smear me off the face of this planet. I wish the first cop to show up hurls, I wish he would dump his lunch all over my mangled body. I don’t feel well. Getting out of my car, of someone else’s old car. I don’t feel well. That’s what I tell the world, I don’t feel well, and I get the day off. I think my boss let me go out of fear, fear of something happening that I would be a part of. Joke’s on him.
  I pull up into my driveway and see her car, with another car next to it. He’s here. He drives the same car. The other man in her life. He has the same haircut, works the same job. But we’re not the same. We’re not the same person. I am not him. He is not me. I grab that old thick rope from my trunk. I hate him. Plenty of rope. All day I’ve been thinking about this and I’m still about to improvise my way through this. I hate him. I think about the knives in the kitchen that we hardly use. Not that, she’d bleed too much. I think about the gun in my drawer that she doesn’t know about. Not that, it would turn her head to mush. I’m coming up the stairs, all slow and silent. Why am I doing this? Why can’t I stop? Our door is open, the light off, the walls red. The walls are blood. I wander into our warm room, she’s sleeping soundly. I feel like I’m floating, everything becoming more than it is. Why can’t I turn around and run, and get out and leave? This can’t be real. My heartbeat is a door, and someone is trying to kick it down. Her steady breathing, something I’ve learned to recognize. She takes one big breath and lets it out real slow. Oh I love that, when you know she’s asleep, when you know she’s in a peaceful place dreaming about a life better than this, dreaming about all the things you never gave her and all the things you never will give her. I remember the very first time I heard her fall asleep, I remember watching her shift into several positions, her muscles becoming more and more relaxed. I remember her breaths becoming slower and slower, and then at some point, as if someone flipped the switch in her head, she was dead.
  Dead asleep I mean. I get closer, he’s in bed next to her, fully clothed. He’s wide awake, looking at her. So am I. Watching her sleep. I give him the rope, he takes it and smiles at me. We’re not the same person. I’m not him, which means he’s not me, right? I’ll leave you to it. I take a step back, I watch him get into a kneeling position on the bed, he’s holding the rope with both hands, about twelve inches of it held tightly between his right and left hand. You can hear the strain of the rope between his fists. He’s edging forward, and in one rapid movement he shoves the rope over her neck and leans down. She makes a small gagging sound, then silence. She’s kicking, but he’s on top of her, pinning her with the bed comforter acting like a straitjacket around her legs. Twisting, twisting, twisting, trying, trying, trying. My girl was always a fighter. I see her reach out and claw his face, my face. I’m not him. I put my hand to my eye, bleeding. What’s happening. Get off her. I watch him lean and lean until she stops fighting. Get off her, now. Taking two steps forward I look on at my wife. How can I be bleeding, I’m not him. The love of my life. She’s having some sort of seizure, spit and foam coming out of her mouth. She’s not dead. I bring the gun and aim for her head, I close my eyes and squeeze. I get her in the throat, she’s choking on blood and lead now, blood. Her blood. She’s not dead. I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, her face, her neck, her chest. She’s a mess. I ruined her. I start to sob. I wasn’t supposed to ruin her beautiful face. Her soft collarbones, the spots I used to trace on her neck are gaping bullet holes now. My bleeding face is constricting, my throat is seizing up. I give him the gun, still on the bed. He points it at me first, saying something about me being him, and him being me. Says something about being trapped in my own head. Something about not being able to get out. He says something about me torturing myself, about me making all this up. Some sort of coping mechanism for committing murder on the only one that ever loved you. Except I’m hardly coping. That’s crazy. You’re crazy. Get out. Get out of my house. What are you doing here. What have you done. Then he points the gun at his head and squeezes. I don’t blink. All I see is blood.
  I’m dragging the bodies now through my house, ruining the carpet, ruining the floors, the walls, my life, smearing everything with blood. Bodies are tough. When it’s dead weight like this, they feel like oversized sandbags always shifting under your grip, never working in your favor. These sandbags have blood coming out of them and it’s slippery and messy. It stings when you wipe the sweat out of your eyes. Him first. I dump him in the back seat, his blown head spilling brains out here and there. No way that’s me, how can I be carrying my own body. How can I be dead and carrying my own body? I get her next and set her next to him. Pieces of her face keep falling off, because of me. I think about how all I’ve been doing my whole life is carrying my body around, putting it through this, through that. I’ve got brains and blood and bits of their faces on me and more blood. I start up the car and drive. I’m driving nowhere in particular, so much time has gone by, I see a subtle glow behind the mountains to the east. I wonder if anyone will wander into my house and see blood like I see blood. It’s nearly morning.
  Ever wanted to keep driving forever? On an endless road? Leading nowhere? You ever wanted to just keep driving and never reach your destination? Trap yourself in this endless loop, where you don’t have to worry about anything except your foot on the gas and the heart in your chest?
  The spot I chose doesn’t matter. It’s just a big plain field in the middle of nowhere I guess. Sitting in the car, I keep seeing your face in the mirror, and it’s making me sick. Birds screaming, a perfect place to take your wife. A perfect place to have a picnic, a perfect place to find out you’re going to be a dad. I remember, “It’s like we always wanted, remember we used to joke about this in high school, raising a kid, getting old together.” I remember my stomach and how it flipped and twisted. I remember how her hair gleamed with the sunrise, how I could practically see her joy radiating out of her. I get out and bring her to the front seat. I buckle her seatbelt. I go to my trunk, and grab my spare tank of gasoline. I can’t be a father, I can’t raise another human being, I can hardly raise myself. This is how you set fire to a car, son. This is how you burn everything you loved, son. This is how you died, son. I don’t really know what I’m doing, I never do, so I just splash gasoline here and there, onto their open wounds, on the hood of my car, all over the seats. I open all the doors. I make a trail of gas a few feet away from the car. I toss the empty container and take a step back, like I did in our room just a few hours ago. A perfect place to burn your car, to burn your wife, to burn your kid, hardly developed inside her stomach, to burn everything you know and love. Just like you’ve been wanting to all day. A perfect place to burn the only family you were ever going to have. I drop a match and the car is fire. I watch her; her hair lighting up into wisps, her skin starts boiling over her bones, I can smell her burning, Imagine the smell you know and love, candles, a person’s natural smell that you inhale every night when you go to bed, imagine that burning. Imagine the smell of that, and burnt plastic. I miss her, I miss her. Her face is nothing but black smoke. I miss her face, I ruined it. I miss her face, where is it? Will she still kiss me? Is it too late? I walk, take five steps towards the car, the fire trying to keep me away. I sit inside, next to you. I can’t feel pain, I can’t feel your bones, I can’t feel your face, I can’t feel the fire, I can’t feel anything. I grab what’s left of your face as my body melts. I put my face, my drooping face up to yours and try. I can’t feel anything anymore. I know you’re wondering why I did this and I know you want me to tell you so here: I manage to whisper through my boiling lips, “All I see is blood.” ... more
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