writing down some
copyright © 1994 by Richard S. Crawford
numbers on her sheet she doesn’t see anything around her and doesn’t even realize that she’s dead that I killed her just a few minutes ago in a violent orgy of blood and knives and destruction and pain and she doesn’t seem to realize it I don’t know why when she sat down this morning at her desk and looked at me and said You are not performing your tasks adequately you should be careful or we might have to let you go is what she said and I know better than that what she really meant is We have you under surveillance and soon we will know exactly what you’re planning don’t you see we have eyes in the backs of our heads, and I look, and there they are, eyes, big and green and bloodshot, right smack in the middle of the back of her head like someone forced them in there with a hammer after drilling extra big holes they don’t look like normal eyes and they scare me and I laugh at her and tell her You don’t have to worry about me I’ll do better and she tells me That’s good and she sits down and begins to work and when I continue to stand there because I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing this morning she looks again up at me and says What are you doing there and I tell her What am I supposed to be doing today, so she says, Fix the two newsstands on the corner and be sure you return the tools When do you need me back I ask Later and so I take the toolbox and go to the corner where the two newsstands sit two big red boxes with white letters and newspapers all over their insides like guts and I wonder what is wrong with them is it their brains so I take out the saw and saw open their heads and poke around in their metal brains for a while blood coursing over my hands like grease from some mechanical device and I take a screwdriver and adjust a few ganglionic nerves so that their brains sit properly inside their skulls again and weld their skulls shut with a screwdriver, this is done I go back to the office and put the toolbox on her desk What shall I do now I don’t know go clean something and that’s when I decide that she needs to die so I begin plotting very carefully and think first what could possibly be wrong with her in the first place is she broken in the brain like those newsstands I just fixed, so I take the saw and saw open her head and look around inside her metal brain grease coursing over my hands like blood from some organic life form which she isn’t and I adjust a few screws so that her brain will sit properly inside her skull and weld it shut again and she keeps sitting and staring at me and asks What’s wrong with you, so I know she isn’t broken in a way that can be fixed so I decide it’s only necessary like I decided before that she needs to die so I take the axe which is sitting on top of my locker and go running at her and start chopping her up into tiny little pieces and I think they look like the little strips of chicken they put into the tacos at Taco Bell and wow there sure is a lot of blood isn’t there and I’m worried about whether I have to clean up the mess I ask the manager and he says What mess so I go on and soon she’s lying on the desk and the floor and the chair and just about everywhere else you can think of and she’s picking up her pen which has blue ink and What are you doing just standing there go fix the old newsstands in the back of the building and she’s using her pen and she’s writing down some