Fill The World With Beauty
horror, short story, gothic, drama
Published on:
May 18, 10:56pmWord Count:
5943Work Description
"I will be placed in a unit for the insane; I will be left to rot. I cannot allow myself to become a number, one of the thousands of people who have lost their minds in a world where the dead remain dead and the living are dying."
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Kurt is hiding, huddled under the table and rocking gently back
and forth with one hand clutching the old dog’s collar. His eyes
never leave me, his face pale and streaked with tears as the
policeman strides around the room. Aunt Mary, with her red nose and
greying hair is attempting to pull him out. He won’t budge and he’s
starting to moan softly in terror. He hates policemen.
“So you haven’t seen anything?” the officer is asking, “Heard
anything suspicious or strange in the last few days?”
Aunt Mary is shaking her head, not really listening. Her attention
is on Kurt, smoothing his ruffled hair and continuing to tug him
out of his hiding place.
“How about you son?” the policeman is asking
I am filled with a bubbling rage, some demon deep within me
stirring emotion I believe I had buried months ago. But it is
surfacing now, erupting from my chest in a burst of intense
anger.
“I’m not your son” I snarl
I am nothing to him and nothing to Aunt Mary. She is my mothers
half sister and has spent the majority of her life on the small
farm we are now forced to reside on. I feel nothing for her, no
connection, no blood ties she so often speaks of when she has
gulped down the drink that clutters the basement. I too have no
respect for the police. For a fleeting moment I wish I was Kurt’s
age, innocent enough to squash under the table and shut out
everything I have seen and done. Except now Kurt has seen it too.
He’s been exposed to true evil and real beauty. I’ve snatched away
his innocence and I don’t regret it. My mind is plagued with
memories of the last encounter with the police, of hearing sirens
blazing and knowing every last trace of comfort and security was
tarnished. When you lose you family, when you have to explain to
your brother that you are all he has left other than memories of
policemen tearing his world apart, you have to fill that emptiness
with something else. My entire head is swollen with untouchable
nothingness, clouded with confusion and grief. And there is only
one thing that penetrates the engulfing fog.
The policeman is giving up now, thanking Aunt Mary for her time.
She is showing him out, her face twisted in disgust, leaving me
alone with Kurt. He is still holding the dog, blinking at me and
silently begging me to make everything alright.
“Are we going to jail?” he asks trembling
I know I should reassure him, tell his that we are staying in Aunt
Mary’s drink smelling farmhouse, safe and shielded from the
nightmares I have exposed him to. But I don’t want safety and
security knowing it could be snatched away at any moment. I’m
thinking of the sanctuary of a prison cell, the comforting feeling
of being enclosed and the things I can do to fill myself with the
joy I have lacked for a long time. I’ll have a cellmate, a pale by
with deep piercing eyes and unkempt hair. I’ll wait until the dark
of some night when his snores fill my ears and I can almost picture
the peaceful softness of his face in the bunk above mine. And then
I’ll smile as I slither from my bed and observe him in the
surrounding dimness. And then I’ll do everything that fills me with
swelling happiness, the actions I have restrained all my life.
There will be a knife under my pillow, and I’ll retrieve it as my
heart begins to thud with anticipation. It will be like a scene
from a comic book, a preview of what is to come in my life as the
kind of person who dominates others nightmares.
But I have never told anyone why, there’s no origin story, no neat
little boxes detailing my decline. No, “See last weeks issue when
the central character spent the night in his local cemetery with
his brother and dug up a grave, and witnessed the unthinkable”
No “see several years ago’s issue when he held his newborn brother
Kurt in his scrawny matchstick arms and promised to protect him
from everything”
There will just be me,
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This story is very well written. I particularly like the narrator, providing us a very introspective look into his thoughts, especially about Aunt Mary, Kurt, a police officer, and a cellmate he fantasizes about murdering. This makes him seem unusually dark and quite conflicted. However, at the beginning of the story I was sort of confused about who the narrator was. It was almost as if he was invisible during the police officer’s routine questioning. The officer didn’t even recognize him, which I found a bit puzzling since police officers doing investigations usually question everyone.
I was left asking what Kurt’s role in this story is. Is he a central character or he is a minor character who exists simply to foster along the narrator’s place in the story? In other words, what is Kurt’s function in this story? What did he do that causes him to ask, who I assume, is his brother, if they are going to jail. The reader is able to determine that Kurt and that he is a child and has a particular aversion to police officers, but we don’t know much else. I find some parts of the following paragraph somewhat disorienting:
What I found really confusing about this paragraph is who is going to prison. Is Kurt going to prison or is the narrator. You write that the narrator wants to tell Kurt that he is staying at Aunt Mary’s, but then you delve into an exposition about the narrator’s supposed comforts of prison life. Speaking about shielding Kurt from prison and then talking about how the narrator hates the feeling of security is quite confusing. I’m not sure about how exactly you would clear up this discrepancy, but I feel this is something you should look in to.
I was also trying to figure out if the cellmate that the narrator fantasizes about murdering is actually Kurt. The following piece was particularly distracting:
You mention the word boy and I am trying to determine if this boy you are referring to is some nameless cellmate or Kurt. My apologies if this sounds a bit too critical, just trying to help you smooth out the kinks.
One strength of this story is the narrator, who makes quite compelling cases for his morbid fantasies of death and murder. He is your quintessential, delusional murderer who sees himself as a savior is some respects.
Beyond your well-developed narrator, I was beginning to pick up some parts of this story that may not be readily apparent. You seem to speak a lot about socialization, and how society forces and/or persuades the masses to believe certain things. While this story’s sole focus seems to be death, your discussions on how our minds are shaped by society are quite interesting indeed. I was able to pick this up in the following:
As I read more and more, I begin to feel as though the narrator is teetering on the brink of necrophilia. While not implying that he derives some sort of sexual pleasure from grave digging, I do feel as though he receives some sort of gratification from the process. This paragraph was particularly effective at addressing this:
One other thing that occurred to me when reading your work, is that maybe death is a metaphor for us all. Correct if I am wrong, but I believe you are essentially saying that, though we all are living in a literal sense, metaphorically, we are actually dead, constantly drugged by what society tells us to believe. Instead, it is actually the dead who are truly living, as they are no longer subject to the tortures of society potent influence. They are finally free to think on their own. This did not occur to me at first, but now it seems to make perfect sense.
What I find quite interesting is the narrator’s sudden realization that all his thoughts may suddenly be nothing but a mere fantasy. He begins to realize that maybe he actually is crazy, and that his brother Kurt, which he previously described as innocently ignorant, is actually right. The following paragraph captured this sudden change of thought very well:
I will say that this literature is quite morbid and by no means is that a fault. You provide us beautiful, yet quite violent look at the theology of a delusional murderer. You successfully mastered the element of rising action. I especially was taken aback by the narrator’s unique but twisted sense of salvation. While murdering people is by no means the proper way to save people, in the mind of the narrator, it is. He seems to think that by killing his drunk Aunt, that he is vanquishing any negative thoughts in Kurt’s mind. But in actuality, he has effectively destroyed any trace of innocence left within the boy. And is you have written, it seems like that this was the narrator’s attempt all along, to corrupt the boy, so he would not be corrupted by the lies of society.
All in all a really great work. Morbid, yes, but original as well. Great work. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of your stuff.