Blood on the Floor

This is a work fiction and far from any reality I have ever experienced. It is a bit graphic. It is suppose to be. If you are skittish, do not proceed beyond this word. If you are not, enjoy or be disturbed. If the latter, I have done my job.

Blood pools silently next to a lying body, its redness an unneeded bright spot on the tiled floor. It is waiting there, hoping to return to its mortal stream, to feel again its ebb and flow, but it will not because the man is dead.

His body is strewn on the floor like a discarded mannequin. His legs were twisted to the left, the knees forming the head of a broken arrow. The torso was conveniently raised to the right for that is the side the blood dripped from. The palms are faced upwards, fingers shooting in the air like blades of grass. His head was the strangest for it looked away from the body, as if it no longer wanted to be a part of the whole. The eyes were wide open set aghast. He seemed in shock at his death, or he could not believe this is what he looked like after it. He wanted to say something for his mouth was set wide and tongue heavy with anticipation. He would have, if all the air in him had not been expelled through the knife wound in his stomach.

The killer had done the job without a plan or knowing that a stomach wound would be fatal. It was just an articulation of his anger, an extension of an emotion that he could not contain anymore, but now looking at the scene of death had him revise his thinking. He played it back in his mind.

The movie played on a screen in his head but there seem to be some clips missing, the most vital ones. He played it over and over, forward and backwards, but nothing. He could not remember killing the man. Since he was the only other living person in the room, simple deduction made him think it was himself.

He could not have, he thought. He looked to the knife that was on the table next to the dead man. Its long razor sharp edge was still slick with blood. It was the wide smile of death that lay on the table, its teeth wet with human energy. It looked at him as if he was the known accomplice.

He had no clue if the man was dead. He would not step forward to find out. He had created an invisible barricade around the man, one he could or would not cross. He was afraid of the body. He thought death was a communicable disease. It was not. But, it was strange he had passed it on to the man on the floor without showing sign or symptom himself.

He looked around him: to the left, to the right, upward and downward, to see if someone had seen him. Or, he was looking for an explanation, a way out. There he was alone in the house with a body 6 foot in front of him. The silence in the room had not a word to offer. The loudest thing was his beating heart. It played a rhythm in his ear that he wished would stop but it could not. The more he thought about the situation, the more it beat and thundered in his ear. Madness was crawling into his soul like a worm burying itself in an apple. He could almost feel it too. It’s a headache that just seems to never go away.

He looked at the body again almost hoping it would lift itself off the ground and the blood would suck back into the stomach. It just stayed there unmoved by his wishes. It looked a heavy thing the dead body the man thought. An invisible rock must be on top of the dead man. His mind was playing tricks on him. Rhyme and reason were leaking out his mind the same way blood had
leaked out of the dead body.

Enough of this he thought. He went over to the table quickly and picked up the knife, the wide smile still there. The two should have been happy to be back together again, but the man looked at the knife like a friend that had betrayed him. He did not even let his eyes look at the body, as he approached the table and got close to the body. He did not want to look at the face directly maybe it might reveal something he did not want to know. He turned around and sped out the front door of the house, leaving it open, absconding with the knife.

There was a full moon out. Its soft light moved through the door like a thin fog. It casted itself on the floor of the house, draping a quiet blanket of light over the corpse as if had paternal instincts. The night air would keep the body perfectly cool. The moon would tend to the corpse proudly as the child it never had, keeping it safe and undisturbed until the morning came. Then, fear, doubt and secrets would stir death from its sleep and wreak havoc on everyone and everything else.

The Inspired Trini