Five Versions of Sadness

by `wildoats

One

There are two types of murderers. The simple murderer knifes his ex-girlfriend roughly two to five days after the break-up. The complex murderer leaves a mark. Perhaps they murder only between the hours of 10-11pm, within a one-mile radius of a church, and only on Sundays. This leaves the police maddeningly close. They guard the nearby park, the local school. They set up checkpoints at every third street corner and rotate at random, avoiding patterns. A quarter of their force is undercover. And yet the complex murderer takes two polaroids: one with the victim alive, with vigilant police in the background (labeled 10:22); another with the victim limp, bloody (labeled 10:26), the same five officers and three squad cars framed through a window. A day later the polaroids and the corpse are discovered on that corner, exactly where a cop stood lookout the night before. This is the mark of the complex murderer. A slim man, now, in his angled room, wonders which he would become if the situation arose. There is so much appeal in an interesting death. The complex murderer is always one step ahead, often with ease. He frames it in this context: a cheetah jogs faster than a human sprints. The complex murderer is impossibly intellectual. On the other hand, there’s a brutality in simplicity that he finds strangely human; the victim dies on their floor, as alone as they had lived the day before. Whereas complexity is a game, the simple murder mimics life. Flipping this decision in his mind, he notices that both the shot glasses he owns are within arm’s reach. He picks them up in his strong hand, labeling each A and B in his mind. He tosses them toward his half-opened window. One lands just short, clanking off the sill and rolling onto his bed. The other escapes the room cleanly, and falls far enough that he doesn’t hear it shatter.


Two

Here is a man who conserves all unnecessary motion when he walks, so that the base of his palm never swings further forward than his thigh, or further back than his hamstring. This achieves a terse rhythm, an uncomfortable stability in movement. His mind works in the same pattern: all ideas lean toward the nucleus, hungry for balance. In this manner his thoughts are a venn diagram, where opinion overlaps convention (a man with his glasses removed might see the circles blur into one). Here is a man who never spits and always flosses; who will never kiss on a first date and owns separate outfits for work, dinner, weekends, golf, and casual outings. Here is a man who, in his thesaurisized mind, mistakes his loneliness for stability. When he is 78, freshly widowed on a Sunday morning, he will witness a miracle and remark: “Ah. A miracle.”


Three

He decides a train ride really is an accurate metaphor for life.  But it’s not in the destination, or the path of travel – it’s the inevitability of losing your balance after you have just risen to your feet.


Four

His inclination toward writing poetry in public places came second only to his penchant for writing poetry completely naked. For 28 years he sought the most private of open spaces – alleyways, forests, his elevated balcony – to remove his clothes and write for hours, uninterrupted. At the end of these years he compiled his works into an anthology and delivered them to a prominent publisher at a nearby university. He briefly considered the inclusion of a short autobiography about his strange writing habits, but decided against it: such a pointed mention might spark unnecessary debate about the writer’s pretension. He wanted to be regarded as a poet and purely that. About three weeks later, two days after he drowned himself in a nearby lake, all 2,864 poems came back to the door of his apartment, along with one rejection letter.


Five

The sunrise – a blonde (natural) – losing a sandal – a picnic – an inside joke – a music concert; these are things he would have experienced by now, were he destined to experience them at all. A picture, like a human, will speak a thousand words, and never say a goddamn thing.