Two Stories
An Escape Plan
1.
Looking in the rear-view mirror of his rusted-out white Ford truck, out past the vague dirt road behind with the undefined borders which gradually fade into the surrounding greenery, he watches the house recede in the distance until it looks like a doll's, like a child's toy, which is as he prefers to imagine it and is the memory which will most likely stick clearest in his mind, and he wonders how long it will take her to notice he's gone and what she will think when she does, but the question is gradually forced further back as another feeling bubbles to the surface: a feeling somewhere between panic and elation upon being, suddenly, in the middle of nowhere and without direction, and free from the cramped space of the dollhouse behind him.
2.
The hotel room, he thinks to himself, seems smaller, he's sure, than the day before, as it was as well the day before that, although, at this point, he thinks, there isn't much he can do and he's paid for the week in advance and he is, to be fair, at least alleviated, if not from the sense of claustrophobia engendered by the tight confines of his truck (a sense of claustrophobia which has followed him into the hotel room), then at least from the equally panic-inducing need for constant movement which he feels while on the road, as if the highway in front of him attracted him through sheer gravity, which would, he supposed, mean he has actually been falling rather than "driving", which implies some sort of presence-of-mind or will exercised on and through the machinery rather than the disinterested playing out of natural forces upon an inert object.
3.
When he met her, and as they got to know each other, and as he grew to, so he said, love her, he stopped seeing choice as a sort of stricture placed upon him, or an infinitely-branching series of equally narrow passages, which is how he used to, and in large part stopped thinking about it altogether, because, he told her one night while sitting on the deck of his apartment with the city spread out below and before them, he loved her, and there wasn't really much choice in that, and the city looked so small and so laughably insignificant anyways, from this distance looking like nothing more than dollhouses--children's toys--but there was an entire world between the two of them, up here, above it, so why leave, where would you go?
Etiology Of A Modern Multiple Murderer
As a child, Charles ("Charlie") Fairweather, Caucasian, now in his late twenties, when asked to explain himself, told his parents (Jon and Lucille Fairweather) that he "didn't know where it came from," when he, as a child, was caught, in a far corner of the family's forested property, "playing" with a deceased raccoon (killed by a large puncture to its left lung, though afflicted, as well, with various post-mortem mutilations), which they (Jon and Lucille) assumed had been killed and left behind by some larger, more ferocious animal, as often happened, and was, in a sense, true in this case as well, and they made him wash his hands thoroughly. After washing, his "mother" (Lucille) saw him in the hallway, and after chastising him, inspected his hands, which were, to Lucille, not satisfactorily clean, and he ("Charlie") was, in a way, glad he had not washed them more thoroughly, as he enjoyed her (i.e. Lucille's, who was in fact "Charlie's" stepmother, and not, in fact, his biological mother, and had married his father (Jon) only a year and a half before this particular incident) touch, rough yet feminine, even as she chastised him. He got the feeling, though, over the years, as he kept his feelings towards her (Lucille, whom he never called "mother" or "mom," but which his father often pressured him to do) secret, that she, in fact, detested him, and he even once overheard her (Lucille) say that she had come quite close to not marrying his father (who he referred to as "Dad") because of him (Charles) and the burden she felt him to be. Overhearing this candid confession, made all the more stinging by the matter-of-fact, flippant tone in which she (Lucille) said it (to his father, no less), he ("Charlie," i.e. Charles Fairweather) was unsure of who was the proper target of his anger: Lucille, for unfairly withholding her love, and not in the slightest way reciprocating his feelings for her (feelings which grew from a special affection and attachment as a child, to a taboo erotic longing as an adolescent), or his father, for not coming to his defence as this woman (Lucille or "Lucy" as his father called her) said such terrible, terrible things about him.