Here's a novel excerpt. Comments welcome, especially from Hillwalker. Watch out for them adverbs and adjectives! :biggrin5:
When he got home, Alexander World felt as if he were moving through congealing glass. It warped the rainy light and gave everything a circus-funhouse aspect, the world seen through distorting mirrors. His limbs were heavy, and he felt himself treading upstream and fighting for breath. The relentless rain beat on the windowpanes like buckshot on a tin roof. Lighting forked the sky, illuminating the interior of the house with a blue-white wash that momentarily banished all shadows, and then a deafening crack of thunder shook the house as in an earthquake. The rumbling that followed sounded like the groaning of a wounded animal. He was soaked, drooling water as he ripped off his wraps and let them fall to the floor in the huge puddle that he had made.
"Honey? The weather is terrible! You must be soaked." It was Cassie, calling from the kitchen. Odors of dinner cooking.
World looked at the furniture in the living room as if they were strangers at a dinner party whom he wished to avoid. The water sluiced off of him. His hair was a lank mat. Water dripped from the tip of his nose as from a leaky faucet.
He shuffled toward the kitchen. Another blinding fork of lightning split the sky, visible in the picture window, and it was followed by another deafening crack. The afterimage of the lightning burned on his retinas, and his ears rang. After the rumble of thunder faded, the windowpanes shuddered as the wind and rain lashed against them. The wind moaned, like Cassie in heat.
Cassie had been the only woman with whom World had slept, until Amanda Clocker had seduced or blackmailed him into bed. When he met Cassie, she was working as a barista at Starbucks. She was not beautiful, but she was not bad looking, either. She was of average looks, and of average intelligence. They had dated for about a year and she idolized him. He had asked her to marry him, not because he loved her, but because he dimly perceived that he needed a wife. And an heir.
She idolized him so much that she did not question his endless late nights at the office. He doubted that she suspected anything. He doubted that she was able to be suspicious about him. She came out of the kitchen.
"Look at you," she fussed, smoothing his soaked hair with her hands. She kissed him on the lips and and told him to get out of those wet clothes. Take a hot shower, for gosh sake! The thunder grumbled, and from another room came the sudden squalling of Alex Junior, three months old. He had been napping but now had been stirred awake by the storm, and Cassie hurried to his room to soothe him. World walked into the kitchen and saw a slaughtered pig lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Cassie had buried a hatchet in its side. The pig's gimlet eyes were open, and it looked up at him in blank bestial appraisal. Astounded, the entrepreneur yanked the hatchet from its hide and more blood squirted out of the pig's corpse. On the HTML chart the blood was hexadecimal red, #FF0000. He peered down at the pig, and it became a vague pink ensemble of pixels. Then it was gone, but the blood remained, as did the hatchet in his hand, its blade dripping more blood onto the linoleum floor.
Another fork of lighting again filled the house with a wash of light, and his infant son's voice rose to a ululating scream. World closed his hands behind his back with the hatchet in one of them and plodded into his son's room. Cassie's back was turned to him. She was holding their son, patting his back and soothing him. There, there. His chin rested on her shoulder, and he could see his heir's face. Wrinkled and misshapen, it reminded him of a shrunken head. The infant's eyes had been closed, but now one of them opened, and father and heir looked at each other across a gulf. Another flash of lightning lit up the room, and his heir's open eye inflated like a balloon. The pupil seemed to have been painted on it. His heir grinned malevolently at him, and a fang gleamed. World staggered backward and quietly slipped out of the room. The rain ticked on the roof. When Cassie had put their soothed son back in his crib, she came out of the room. He swung the hatchet at her. The blade flashed and he buried it in the center of her throat. It slicked through her spinal cord, which exploded in flinders, and continued out the back of her neck. As her blood geysered upward, her head floated up in slow motion, like a balloon released by a child. Then it abruptly fell to the floor and nestled up against the toes of his shoes like a bowling ball rolled down from a dispenser, her two astounded eyes located where the ball's finger holes should be. Her hair was uncharacteristically askew, and her mouth ajar. Blood leaked down from the corners of it and pooled on the floor.
"Delete," World muttered. He plodded back into his son's room with his back hunched Quasimodo-like, his arms crossed behind his back at the wrists, the hatchet dangling from his left hand. It dripped Cassie's blood.
When he reached the crib, another blinding flash of lightning cast his long shadow against the far wall, raising the hatchet high over his head. The boom of thunder coincided with the whump of the blade. Outside a tree branch lashed furiously in gale-force winds. It broke through the window and whiplashed around the room amid a spray of glass fragments and needle-like rain. World threw up an arm to shield his eyes, and some of the shards cut his flesh. He regretted the loss of the window. A knothole in the tree's trunk regarded him balefully, like an eye of an Ent.
Afterward, he dumped the remains of his wife and their heir into a wastebasket in the kitchen. Fortunately, the storm had abated. The lightning and thunder had made him jumpy, as if he had had too much of Cassie's Starbucks coffee, which he had never particularly cared for. He preferred Dunkin' Donuts coffee. He wandered into his den and sat down before his personal computer. With his cursor, he transferred the files of his dead wife and heir to the wastebasket icon on the desktop. He right-clicked, and chose EMPTY TRASH. A message popped up: Are you sure you want to empty the contents of this folder? They will be permanently deleted.
With a cursor click he averred that he did, and then the illusion of his wife and heir, those poor pixels, were swallowed up in in a virtual black hole in some cynosure of cyberspace.
“Cassie, I’m home,” he sang out, feeling refreshed. He could smell dinner cooking in the kitchen. He rubbed his blood-soaked hands together. He had worked up an appetite.
“Cassie?”
Puzzled at receiving no response, he left his room and strolled toward the kitchen. He was disquieted to see red fluid on the floor at the entrance it. He wondered if she had dropped a bottle of Heinz ketchup.
When he entered the kitchen, he discovered that their bodies were still there. They clogged the wastebasket like rebellious garbage, their lifeless limbs stretched out ungainly over the rim of it. Only their heads were missing. He had set them on a shelf in his den, to serve as bookends.
***
On April 15, 2016, one year after rising from the dead and one hundred and fifty one years after dying, Abraham Lincoln tweeted the following message on his Twitter account:
Abe Lincoln @alincoln
I shall again seek the #presidency. Details to follow in a speech.
A mere sixty-six characters, with a hashtag. But then, the president had always been known for the concision of his utterances, his famed Gettysburg Address the speechifying 19th century equivalent of a modern Twitter oration. With some bemusement, Lincoln had recently told Sully and Hortense that he was going to try to tweet that address in 140 characters. Just for the hell of it.
That night, hours after Lincoln's terse tweet had lighted up cyberspace and thrown the mass media and social media into convulsions, Alexander World finally decided what to do about the wife and heir that he had dragged to the trash. For days he had tried to empty their trash on his computer, but never succeeded. It astonished him. As the clouds of his madness rent slightly to let in a brief scintillation of the sunlight of lucidity -- it had finally stopped raining in greater Seattle after a near-Noahchian thirty-two consecutive days -- he decided that he had to do something, because the corpses were rotting and stinking up the house.
Because he lived in the boonies, thirty miles outside Seattle, the nearest neighbors were about a mile away. That meant he could bury the bodies on his property, with little risk of being spotted. So he did, that night. Still, it unnerved him that the skies had completely cleared, and a full moon shone down like a prison searchlight as he labored. Anyone who happened to be around would have seen his silhouette against the giant horizon-hugging moon, the shovel digging at the earth. The bodies going in. Then the shovel patting clods of dirt over them.
He had saved their heads as bookends. He contemplated them, and then he recalled that next Wednesday was Amanda Clocker's birthday. She had gifted him for his birthday. He owed her.
