SECOND GRADE SERIAL KILLER
THIS IS A SHORT STORY. IT IS FICTION.
This piece is directly inspired by Randy’s piece linked below. I highly recommend his work.
You’re on the list. I was fond of saying it because my dad was fond of saying it. I didn’t know what it meant but I felt what it meant like sometimes I didn’t know what my dad was talking about but I knew how his face looked and how his voice echoed. I said “you’re on the list” to Shelby in second grade and she gathered all her friends together and they laughed and told me I would become a serial killer. And then I laughed because they were on my list and when I grew up I would become a serial killer and I would cross Shelby’s name off my list. I knew what I meant even if I didn’t really know what I meant just like Shelby and her friends laughed at me because they knew I would become a serial killer and Shelby wrote me a note with exes and ohs written at the end of it. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know why Shelby’s friends laughed. I knew they were on the list. And now I am in my thirties and own a house and so many people were placed on my list and the one I really remember is Shelby and her laughing with her friends.
I haven’t serial killed in spite of keeping a list and wanting to cross names off of it and sometimes seeing people fall into pieces when I closed my eyes, even, and maybe moreso, in elementary school. Thinking about lists and how loud my dad was. Imagining the teacher in half. Getting the best grades in every class and hating every second of it and drawing pictures of the school burning down the same day I was given an award for “student of the month,” thinking to myself that this is the perfect serial killer origin story. In second grade and thinking about my origin story as a serial killer just like a serial killer would. Thinking that Jack the Ripper was a character in a movie and I was in a movie too and there was an invisible audience for my second grade mind, blind to the literal audience of girls laughing at me. Putting them on the list. Putting anyone on the list. Second grade.
I own a house now, sweetie. Shelby, you were on the list and you will never be invited to my piece of shit house. But I’ve got time. And I never forgot about you. You’re the only one I really remember from my list. And I never stopped acting in a movie, considering my own serial killer diagnosis, I break the fourth wall in my movie about my serial killer origin story and I tell the audience that I am well aware that this origin is cliched, banal, a recycled script. And then I’m allowed to do anything, like serial kill, because I know that the audience wants its expectations subverted, I am well aware of the tropes of the genre, of the fact that I am a serial killer mastermind, always one step ahead of the police, who are you, the audience, the audience and the police are both on my tail because I am a serial killer in a movie and I break the fourth wall and directly address both of them that I am well aware that they are well aware of everything I do in front of a camera.
But the times have changed since Jack the Ripper, and the times have even changed since Shelby and I were in second grade and the audience has even changed and they’ve grown up watching movies about serial killers so they know what I’ll do before I even do it because my character has a clear arc and an established conflict and cutting up women is exactly the sort of thing a former second grader who keeps a list of people to kill and has a stack of pictures of destroyed schools would do. And I’m even in the audience and I’m also on TV, and, a thirty-one year old man remembering that he used to say “you’re on the list,” watches the program, enraptured, and says “what will this guy do next?”
The thing that I do next is become a serial killer. Truly subvert the audience’s expectations. Because the audience knows that serial killers are actually retarded outcasts, movies are not real, beautiful well-adjusted people don’t have secret lairs with body parts in air-tight coolers. So I subvert everyone’s expectations, myself included, and I actually become a serial killer, I do the impossible in this day and age. There’s no way to do it, you say, there’s no way in light of the ubiquity of cameras, they’re probably even in your car and everyone is carrying one around all the time, and that’s not even considering advancements in DNA crime-scene analysis technology, or Ring cameras, or audio recording app permissions, or group chats, or the fact that Chris Watts’ wife’s friend reported her missing because she didn’t respond to a text message for a few hours.
I got a taste on dating apps where I learned bashing cat heads with rocks felt good. Sending a message where I knew I sounded like an unreasonable insane person and I could cross Shelby off the list, I could play with a rodent’s entrails, I could take a screenshot of her seeing my message for me to masturbate to later. Not literally jacking off but metaphorically jacking off to rejecting a real woman on a fake screen that becomes real when I metaphorically jack off to it and it becomes a stage with running water and plumbing and all the food I could ever eat. I have a folder of screenshots. They’re for me to laugh at. Looks like a refrigerator filled with heads. My screenshots of rejecting women for no reason other than the fact that I am serial killer and that’s what a serial killer does, he serial kills. I do it in high definition dropped down to 72DPI in a screenshot but it’s not about the reality of the image or its intransient quality living on in eroded copies across a smeared timeline, it’s about me re-living a fantasy over and over again where I never stop crossing names off my list and I’m always one step ahead of the law.
But that wasn’t enough because nothing is ever enough because killing a rat isn’t killing a woman isn’t killing the world and I’m a serial killer who must kill and escalate and return to the scene of the crime to laugh at the police officer who eyes me suspiciously. Actually setting up a date and showing up and sitting down in front of a woman and not saying anything, just sitting there staring at her not saying anything wasn’t enough and that was when I knew nothing would ever be enough and I would have to kill again and again until I was caught by the police who could never catch me.
My profile doesn’t say much, just “I hope you’re well. I like showing off.” And there’s pictures of me naked, face obscured. And I know I look better than a pornstar, because, after all, I’m a serial killer just like my fictional hero Patrick Bateman and I have an even better exercise routine than he does and my cock is huge. And beyond that, I don’t have to do much, I don’t have to make a list or cross names off of it, I just post a new picture sometimes and I look better than a pornstar and I live in your city and I could fuck your wife the way you fantasize about. A serial killer just like her fantasy. Exes and ohs.
Men love fantasizing about their wife being serial killed more than perhaps you understand. Unless you’ve already sent me a message. Then you’re well aware. He fantasizes about his wife being pleasured in a way that he cannot do while it’s still he who provides the pleasure, sets up the date with the serial killer: and then the man can do anything, his wife is always beholden to him and his fantasies and she lives inside a television inside his head and he begs me to serial kill just the way she likes and so she always, always, always owes him and he wins sitting in a chair masturbating to the television in his head. The profiles say they are shared by the couple but I can tell it’s always a man sending me a message. And look at that I’ve once again subverted audience expectations: this second grade serial killer kills men too. They’ll say something like “we like your profile” and I start getting off on the fact that I know what’s coming, I know I’m going to dissect this man and his wife without raising a finger other than to tap tap tap on my keyboard, my murder weapon of choice.
A serial killer can’t serial kill in this day and age so he has to become something else. And you wonder why the serial killer must serial kill and you watch movies and documentaries and you read books and watch interviews and you and everyone else are always looking for something: a brain scan, a history of physical abuse, wetting the bed, issues with mom, issues with dad, dyslexia, access to dead animals, anything clear and shining that you can point to so you can understand something and see a cause and effect. Because you want to do it to yourself too. You want there to be something, some moment in your past, some aspect of your genetics, something your dad said, something your mom didn’t say, something bright and shining sitting on the ground waiting for you to pick it up so you can stop looking for bright and shiny things and, finally, your life will begin just the way you fantasized. You’ll never stop. You’ll never stop looking for causes and you’ll never stop seeing effects—ending the fantasizing is a fantasy too. You’re disappointed before your refractory period is even over.
The ultimate triumph for a psychotic serial killer is no longer killing a woman these days, rejecting her is even more of a degrading humiliation. Imagine a guy doing that, going out of his way to match with as many women as possible on a dating app just so he can reject each of them—he’s worse than a rapist and worse than a killer. He’s literally me. And the most disturbing rape scene in a movie doesn’t entail any penetration—it’s the rape scene from Wild at Heart where Willem Dafoe’s character forces Lauren Dern’s character to say “fuck me” and he denies her. He is disgusting, he knows he is disgusting, but he touches Laura Dern’s character and whispers in her ear and pushes the right buttons and finally, she breaks, she submits, she says “fuck me” to this disgusting symbol of unfiltered, phallic impulse (his head squeezed into a tight mask like the glans within foreskin, and his self-annihilation a pornographic cumshot scene: his head within a mask evoking the image of a sperm cell, the mask trailing his head like the sperm’s flagellum while his blood splatters on the wall) and it’s worse than rape because he has not forced himself inside of her physically, he has in some other, mental way, and at that lowest point of mental submission and humiliation he laughs and denies her, twisting the knife. I saw that and I didn’t think Willem Dafoe’s character was literally me but he was something inside and outside, beyond me and David Lynch and anyone with a soul, and the true evil of men happens when they refuse to see that Willem Dafoe’s character lives inside their hearts as well as the screen.
“We like your profile,” they say, and my list grows. I ask what they like about it and it’s a man pretending to be his wife telling me that her hubby spoils her and he likes to watch her with hung, muscular men, he likes it when his wife becomes part of a fantasy that isn’t even his fantasy, it’s a program programmed by programs written to me in a direct message by the hubby program; it’s little people inside big heads sending me a message about my picture where I’m a pornstar who’s a twenty minute car drive away. And I goad him, I tell him that I’ve done this many times before, it isn’t the first time, I have experience and I’m clean and safe and he asks me for more pictures and I send him the one I’ve sent countless others and he sends me a picture of his wife masturbating while he watches. And he sets up a time and he sets up a place and he asks me for confirmation and then I stop responding. Another screenshot for the trophy shelf. And it’s seemingly pointless the way that killing prostitutes is seemingly pointless and all the screenshots over time end up looking the same in the same way that all heads decompose into fungible skulls. But each one actually has a story and they look the same to you because you aren’t a serial killer and you don’t collect heads.
You say he’s a gay guy with daddy issues. You’ve found your bright and shiny object. He wrote a story called Sincere Gay Porn. He just described sending nudes to what he assumes are men. Gay. And a misogynist par excellence—it’s not even rejecting a woman it’s rejecting a man’s fantasy of a woman. Complete loss of female agency. Beyond killing prostitutes, beyond personal rejection through a dream-screen, it’s even a rejection of her as fantasy. So I must be a gay misogynist with daddy issues, just like Bret Easton Ellis, considering he wrote American Psycho, and he’s said in interviews that Patrick Bateman was based on his father and it’s a book where a guy horrifically kills mostly women and there’s a misogyny unique to gay men that they can access through men’s anuses and child trafficking baby boys to molest. You want to put me on your shelf. Another trophy. And look at that. I subverted your expectations again. You were the serial killer all along. You kill with your causes and effects and your diagnoses and your credentials and your consensus. You kill every second of every day looking for motivations and psychological states and labels so you can turn something living into something dead. A head in your refrigerator. He’s a misogynist who hates his dad and his head is on your shelf. I took a screenshot of the message you sent me. You should try talking to your wife.