Been a while, I know, but here is my 500 Club submission for this week. (I really miss writing these posts when I go a couple of weeks without contributing. I suppose I should post more than once a week. Sucks that I have to maintain a day job.) The prompt for this week’s post is: “The last thing [CHARACTER] wanted to do that day was…” I have, once again, returned to the unnamed gay assassin. Hey, if it works, it works. Hope you enjoy it.
the upside
The last thing I wanted to do that day was shoot my father. It’s not that I didn’t want him dead–I did. Badly. And it’s not that I was unwilling to do the deed, myself. I wanted very much to spill his blood, to watch, to witness his exit from a world he had made a living hell for me.
Really, I just didn’t feel like doing it on a school day. It complicated things. Considerably.
My planned alibi–a trip to library, where I would duck out a back door, kill him, and then returning to my studies–would not suffice. It would hardly make sense for me to venture to the library to do homework early in the morning on a weekday. As a result, I had to think quickly and, though I wasn’t a skilled or experienced assassin at that time, I knew theoretically that my chances of appearing guiltless decreased relative to the amount of creativity I had to employ on the spot.
But the bastard left me with little choice.
It was Wednesday morning. He was nursing a fierce hangover and, I suspect, was still slightly intoxicated. He unleashed his considerable anger on my mother, who had not made him pancakes for breakfast. She had, instead, been working the night shift at a convenience store and, exhausted, collapsed on the couch in the living room on the way to the kitchen. When I found him, he was punching her in the face repeatedly. She had already passed out. He had blood on his arms to the elbows.
I walked quietly to his room, retrieved his hand gun and crept back down the hall. With steady hands, I aimed and fired. Three shots. Two to the chest, one to the head. I had planned something more gradual, something that would look like suicide but allow me the pleasure of watching him die slowly. I wanted him to die knowing I was killing him. Me. Just a kid. It involved Drano and a funnel.
This was too fast, too easy for him, but he would have killed her, I’m quite certain, and this fact is what saved me from needing any alibi at all. The police saw it as a strange kind of self defense. It never even when to trial. Not in the courts, anyway. My mother refused to speak to me after that day, her own judgement levied against me.
It seems she loved him, even to the end. He broke her left cheek bone that day and dislodged seven teeth. She threw up blood for three days. But I was the one who took her love from her, no matter how much he deserved the taking, and she never forgave me.
After that, killing for money seemed an easy thing. People die every day. I suspect that most have it coming. God knows he did. I only wish it could have been slower.
But, he is dead, and that, I suppose, is the upside.