Genital Grinder Read Online Free Page B

images from a life you haven’t even begun. Or at least it doesn’t seem that way.
    So you ask yourself—why the fantasies?
    You immediately think of the magazines. They were in a box in the attic, guarded by the torso of a mannequin. The attic light bulb burned out sometime after Christmas and had not been replaced by summer. You were bored enough to look around anyway. No school and all your friends were on vacation, so you got adventurous. It was early afternoon and the sun was as bright as a camera flash through the only window.
    It indicated the box.
    That’s what you thought years later. You were meant to find the box and the heavens conspired to make sure you did. You opened it and then sat down in the surrounding pool of light, as though the pull of gravity was greatly concentrated in that one special area.
    Ironically a good deal of the magazines you found were issues of Life, although many of the images on the cover were devoted to the antithesis of its namesake.
    Death triumphant.
    The War to End All Wars.
    You didn’t really care about this, though. School was in a few weeks, you’d hear plenty of it then. The other magazines you found, though . . . you weren’t going to hear Ms. Garza talk about them in a classroom. Not ever.
    Time had not been especially kind to them. The pages were yellowed and slight water damage left waves on some of the covers. They looked like comic books at first, which might have been interesting anyway, but then you saw they were something else. They bore the title SHOCKING DETECTIVE. The covers were illustrated, united by a theme similar to the Life coverage of the War to End All Wars.
    The theme was women.
    Women in various stages of undress.
    Women in peril.
    They all looked like Hollywood starlets who lived in the same apartment building. They could have been sisters, these redheads, brunettes, and blondes. They were all beautiful, they were all voluptuous, they were all terrified—their mouths set in a silent scream that seemed to resound far beyond the barriers of the page.
    They all had male visitors.
    Men with masks and black gloves.
    Men with knives.
    You were initially disappointed when you opened these issues of Shocking Crimes and discovered they weren’t illustrated after all; only the covers were artistically rendered. You were still interested enough to read them, though, even if there was going to be plenty of that in school, too.
    Who could have resisted the allure of the articles, though? Such titles! “Madman Mutilated the Missouri Mother!” “Sadist Slaughtered Six Southern Belles!” “Fiend Filleted Aunt Frieda!”
    The promise didn’t stop there. Even a cursory glance of the articles revealed several highlighted captions throughout which presented the horror in bigger letters and bolder print.
    For instance:
    “Her husband of fifteen years couldn’t even recognize her. Several blows to her face and an aborted attempt to burn her remains resulted in damage too extensive for identification. ‘You’d never believe that twisted mass of burnt decay was ever a human being,’ said coroner Brad Zeller.”
    But not to be outdone by:
    “The murder weapon was obviously an axe. There were deep grooves consistent with overhead swings of said instrument in sixteen wounds on her body. There were also footprint indentations on her rib cage, as though the killer stood on her to help him withdraw the axe so that he could swing it again . . . and again . . . and again.”
    They were always crimes of passion, if not necessarily in the traditional sense. This wasn’t about retribution because of a cheating wife. This was something deeper. You understood that then, even if you could never have verbalized it. This was about a sacred drama, scenes from a ritual unfolding in unremarkable corners of Everywhere.
    Where does something like this begin?
    It began with Shocking Crimes and a simple connection.
    You then became I, and I have killed six women. He knew little