Custodiet Ipsos Custodes

            Paranormal, probably a short story. The main character finally falls in love with a girl, the first person that knows about his compulsion. One day, he receives a premonition that she is going to kill someone. The story hinges on his decision of whether or not to kill her. 

           The first round took the priest high in the chest, severing his aorta and sending a long spray of blood against the brick wall. I racked the bolt and aimed down the scope. His t-shirt soaked with wine-dark arterial blood as he staggered back. The groceries he was carrying smashed against the ground.

            I guess this is the part where I have to say that he was raping choirboys or trafficking cocaine. He wasn’t. He didn’t have any prior arrests. He didn’t have any prior crimes. He entered the clergy at fifteen in a Catholic school, trained for years.

            He was leaning against the wall then. His mouth was moving. Sacrements, perhaps. His own last rites. Can priests do that? Administer their own last rites?

            I squeezed the trigger again and his brains evacuated.

           

           

            You know how detectives will show up to a crime scene, do the dirty work, find the bad guy, and put him in jail? Then sometimes there’s vigilantes, who hunt people down that have slipped through the cracks. Well, I’m a little different.

            I see things before they happen. Not things. Crimes. Murders, specifically. It is always a one hundred percent chance that it will happen. This started when I was thirteen.

            The first one was my neighbor. She was older, maybe fifty. Sexy, for an older lady. She asked me to water her garden. Standing in the heat, hose gripped in my right hand, I had a sudden vision. I watched her in my mind’s eye as she straddled a man in her bed and wrapped a curtain cord around his neck. I chalked it up to hormonal fantasy. Two weeks later, she drove away in the back of a squad car; past the ambulance where paramedics loaded a faceless corpse on a gurney.

            The second time it happened, I tried to stop the murder. A neighborhood kid, maybe two years older. He went by the name of Chow, good kid. I saw him in that vision swinging a bicycle chain, leaving little chubby Danny Goodwin bleeding in the arroyo in our neighborhood          .

I walked Danny home every single day for two months. He didn’t understand why I carried a butterfly knife with me. My appendix ruptured one day and I went to the hospital. I saw Danny Goodwin’s body from a helicopter shot on the evening news.

The murders are unstoppable. They find a way, like weeds growing through a sidewalk. When I get the vision, it’s only a matter of time before every clue in the vision lines up like lock tumblers and the victim dies. There’s no way to stop it, so I kill the killer before he kills someone innocent.

Goals AF

            This is basically Finnegan’s Wake, but written in millennial twitter speak, from the perspective of a girl about another girl. I like to consider myself devastatingly original, but I think I’m just devastating the English language with this. Anyway, it’s an interesting experiment. I’d like to add emoji. Here’s a taste.

            This was the night that Breanna came over like, all pissed off. Kyle had been acting ratchet af lately and talking to like fifty diff sluts on twitter but most ppl knew he was banging like all of them. Idk if she thought we were friends or whatever but she was crying and her mascara was running and I felt kinda bad so I let her in and we talked in my bedroom for a minute.

            Her dad was like some sort of stockbroker but he was old and super hot and super rich and treated her like DIAMONDS which is goals af literally the best thing I would DIEE if I had a dad like hers. He was off on some business trip in an all-glass hotel room in Detroit or Vegas or someplace and couldn’t be around. Her mom was dead, saddest thing ever, and she had passed away before Breanna could have any little brothers or sisters so she was basically alone in this giant mansion all the time. Her dad was weird af kinda like a teenager he worked out all the time and was like shredded and shit and drove this murdered out G-wagon which was basically sex on wheels and I loved riding around in it.