A Personal Tragedy: One
This is the first section of the serialized novella “A Personal Tragedy".”
The boasting doesn’t come from pride. It comes from a rotting shame that grasps at any tool of the ego to assuage guilt. Professing, often only to themselves, the righteousness of their act of killing in an attempt to claw back the very humanity that they stole from someone else.
The only way to unravel the truth from someone like this is to allow yourself to exist within their construction and see where the uneven seams and moth holes in the fabric are. Here, there was no false universe to explore as everyone seemed to believe there was no perpetrator in the first place.
The first time it happened it was written off as a personal tragedy. The second, an odd coincidence. By the third time it was simply a sign of the times. Whatever quantity of bodies you stacked up beyond that wouldn't have mattered. The townspeople had already built their own reality where consistent deaths were just a thing that happened in Sibyl. On the same level of concern as their troublesome coyote population and the unavoidable stench of rot and ammonia that wafted from the industrial tannery. Nothing more than an obnoxious environmental quirk. It was to protect themselves from the rather obvious notion that something was deeply wrong.
I had come to the conclusion that the whole town was deluded. It was easier to swallow than the possibility that they were all irreparably stupid. In my conception of things, the tolerance for mysterious deaths should be firmly set to zero. Now, I can’t say murders because in the official reports that’s not what they were. Unnatural is as far as anyone would go in terms of modifiers. It’s fitting, as a round of buckshot to the head isn’t how you’d expect an 82-year-old to go.
Three fresh plots were dug in the cemetery that year. Three old men were celebrated through well-attended church services. All three had closed caskets to preserve their image given the less-than-tidy nature of their supposed suicides.
The next body, instead of being buried, was unearthed the following spring. Jim Crowler found it in March when snowmelt caused enough runoff for the banks of the river to erode. A femur peeking out of the warm dirt made its first appearance in tandem with a row of crocuses.
When he first saw it, along with the remaining tissue still hugging the bone like cling wrap, he thought it must have been from a deer, its hide tanned naturally from the sun. The heart tattoo, mangled and shrunken on the desiccated skin, told him otherwise.