By Connor Coyne
The next morning, Friday, March 29th, 1996, I walked into Eastern High School, and it told me a story.
Some kid – it was a boy – on this everyone agreed – a white boy – had gotten picked up at Northern High School that morning. He got picked up because he was a witness to murder. He was wanted because he was a “person of interest.” He got picked up because he’d murdered someone. He’d murdered another Northern kid. He’d murdered his own cousin. He’d freed from arterial prison some blood the two had shared.
They’d been alone together at some house overnight – these cousins – and the kid – the murderer – had already been going crazy for a long time. Now, an undrinkable drip from a broken faucet. He noticed it until he stopped noticing it. It was always there. The hypnotic beat of misery. With each beat he thought thoughts. He’d often thought thoughts. He hadn’t done them. He had seen them. In his life. In others. He wanted to do them sometimes. Doing them would be wrong and un-undoable, so he never did them. But he could think them without doing them. So, he decided to do that. To think the thoughts. They soothed him. Calmed him. Helped him ignore the drip drip drip.
But he couldn’t ignore his cousin. The stupid bitch went on and on about everything he was doing and how he was going to go to college, and he didn’t notice that some people weren’t going to college, and didn’t want to go to college, and didn’t want to hear him talk and talk and talk about it all the goddamn time! Some people are stuck in this shit their whole lives, so why don’t you just shut the fuck up motherfucker?
“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “Or I’ll fucking kill you. I fucking swear I will.”
The intensity in his voice surprised him, but the cousin answered with a smirk:
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will. You’ll die before you see the sun again. I’ma take that there baseball bat and smash your fucking head in. I’ll smash your brains all over the walls!”
The cousin looked nervously at the baseball bat, and the kid had smiled in satisfaction. He’d won the argument. It was enough. Until the fucking asshole cousin had said, “I don’t think so. The metal bats are hollow, you see. I think the metal would crumple up before my head.”
Drip drip drip. Talk talk talk.
“Then I’ma hit you with the handle part, motherfucker! Or maybe I’ll get a wood bat, or a gun, or a knife, or some fucking scissors. I don’t fucking care how I do it. I’ma kill you tonight. I’ma kill you with my bare hands if I have to.”
That had shut the cousin up. He’d hurried off to his room, shaking. The kid folded his arms behind his head now. He’d won, he thought. Only, he knew, he hadn’t won. He never won. He couldn’t win. Not in this life. And he knew this because his stupid snotty boogershit pussy bitch cousin would be awake the next morning, saying the same annoying fucking shit.
“I guess you decided not to kill me after all!” he would say.
The kid left the house, trembling, shaking; he didn’t know why, shaking shaking. Drip drip drip. He left in such a hurry he forgot to put his shoes on. He went out barefoot. He went out into the dark cold wet. He splashed out to the shed garage. He dug around in the ruts until he found a hatchet. Rust dusted the blade. He picked it up by the haft. He hit the blade broadside against his foot to wipe the mud off, but it didn’t work. His foot was still muddy, but now there was blood on the blade. He blinked, and water ran in his eyes. He squinted at the hatchet. His foot was bloody, and there was mud on the blade. There was mud on the blade, and his foot was muddy. He thought thoughts. His foot was bloody, and there was blood on the blade.
The rain fell in steely sheets. The snow was all gone by now. The rain had gotten rid of it. The rain banged against the wood overhead. The rain wormed its way inside. Drip drip drip. The kid – the wannabe killer – looked out through the garage door. He could see the bedsheet curtains of his cousin’s second-story window. His cousin had left his bedroom light on, even though he’d gone to bed for the night. His cousin was afraid of a murderous cousin.
The wannabe killer slapped the haft of the blade against his foot. He thought his thoughts. But what if I did it? he wondered. He’d thought about it so many times. He knew he would keep thinking about it until he finally decided to try it. Am I going to do it? After all these years, was tonight the night? Am I evil? he asked himself. What’s evil? he asked. What’s good? It wasn’t, he decided, that he couldn’t differentiate between the tortures he’d endured and the disproportionate agony he was maybe planning to execute in ten or five minutes. He wasn’t a puritan, but he wasn’t a moral relativist either.
No, it was more that he didn’t care about these distinctions much anymore. Other distinctions took precedent. All of the colors had been leeched from his life until all that remained was red and gray. Gray was the rain, the cold, the mold, the motionlessness. Red was movement and action and life. Other people had hacked into his gray life to make their blood pump faster. He knew it worked because he had seen it. And he realized that, since he was stronger than his cousin, harder and more ready, he could cut this bitch into a thousand bloody chucks all crackling with electricity. A reverse Frankenstein, he could take life and render it into meat and feel his own life enhanced through his action. He slapped the haft of the hatchet against his foot.
The wannabe killer knew that whatever fun he got from killing his cousin would be temporary. He knew that if he killed it would be fun for a few seconds, while the punishment would last for years. Maybe his whole life. But was prison going to hurt more than the lit cigarettes his dad had ground into the bottoms of his toes as a baby? He couldn’t remember it, but he knew and named the scars. Could prison be any worse than days at this school where he couldn’t read the words, and the math books were filled with alien squiggly symbols? He burned. He froze. The crowds boiled like buckets of water, and the teachers crowed like tongueless horses. No, he thought, he had the strength and the will, and he’d understand prison better than he understood Northern High School.
He was so close. He was almost resolved. He touched his teeth with his tongue. He only had to discharge one last excuse before he could finally go and kill.
The kid’s mom had talked about God the last time he’d seen her. God said that murder was wrong. God said that murder would keep you out of heaven. God said that murder would send you to hell. And God had rented his family a shack in the Os. God had evicted them from that shack, and that’s why he was at this shitty house with his cousin and hearing, over and over, about what a fucking genius his cousin was, and all his big fucking plans for the future.
The wannabe killer knew that the landlord God wasn’t the God they worshiped in church. But why had this landlord taken on the name of God? It wasn’t to seem good. It was to seem powerful. God wanted to seem good, but that wasn’t essential. The power was essential. If you want to be God, you’ve got to get the power to live and the power to kill. So, no. God wasn’t going to keep him from becoming a murderer. In fact, murdering might make him into a kind of god.
So here he was, at last. His last moments as a wannabe killer. It was time, finally, to take all of the rot that the world had pushed into his skinny frame over seventeen years and discharge it bladewise into his cousin.
He flipped the hatchet and caught it by the handle.
He put his feet back into the mud.
He went into that house and did what he had decided to do.
It was everything that he had hoped it would be.
Once the kid had murdered his cousin, he stripped and took a shower. He got dressed again and finished the cold pizza in the fridge because now he didn’t have to share it. He left the body curdling upstairs and went to sleep on the couch. The next morning, the kid went to school. The parents came home and found the body of their son. They called the cops. The cops showed up at Northern and walked out with the murdering kid. As he left the school, he wore a hideous smile. He didn’t care what happened now. He didn’t have to say anything. He had already spoken with the hatchet, and the hatchet had said it all.
That was the story I heard at Eastern.
It evolved throughout the day, taking on new shades, new meanings. We felt it flow through us. We felt, all of us, like we knew these two children: the killer and the killed. And I wondered, when I went to Northern for my magnet class, what I would hear about it there.
But just before it was time to get on the bus, I got paged to the office.
My father met me there.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You see Adam today?”
“No. Why?”
“I thought I could maybe give him a ride home,” he said. “I signed you out. Follow me.”
Related Feature: One Question: Connor Coyne
Connor Coyne (he/him) is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan.
He’s published several novels and a short story collection, and his work has been featured in Vox.com, Belt Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Flint’s College Cultural Neighborhood (aka the East Village), less than a mile from the house where he grew up. Learn more about Connor’s writing at ConnorCoyne.com.
