GUTTED

The train rattled by, and had appeared so abruptly, that it gave Madison, a local boy from the village, quite a shock. Madison was sat cross-legged with his t-shirt tossed aside and a cheap camera around his neck. He liked to take pictures of trains going by, and then analyse them at a later date in the hope of spotting any peculiar anomaly in it; like a bird being frightened by the sudden flourish of activity, or a passer by turning his head to regard the vehicle with interest. He leant back and stabbed his hand with an invisible thistle.

He pondered, ’I would like a dog, and my dog will be called Pilot. I will acquire him young, but train and develop him to be a shrewd orator and a keen businessman, ready for the world and any problems it may present to him. That way i will be able to pass on the lessons i’ve learnt and the songs i’ve sang. I will show him my pictures, and surely he will find them interesting, because i will tell him all i know about trains; where they’re going, where they’re from, what they’re for, and if i know it, the name. I will show him these trees and these flowers, and how to treat them with the respect that they deserve; so he won’t be like all those other dogs, terrible and malignant thrashing around in a bed of beautiful flowers, looking for their toy.

Madison was again startled by another train, hurtling past at breakneck speed, but Madison didn’t mind, and lapped at the visual ambrosia, clicking rapidly with his cheap camera. Later that day, he wandered down to the local market where he bought a small knife and a packet of sweets, and with the knife he cut through a wasp he’d found the day previous, and kept in a jar in the garage at home. Madison was actually a masochist and a sadist, being at the age where sexual pleasure first begins to fascinate and interest a young boy such as him. What began as the torture of small wild animals, frequent emotional confusion, and the occasional surfing of illegal sites on the internet, slowly evolved into something much more dangerous, and i remember his recalling (during a party being hosted by a friend somewhere in the east in Scotland) a night he spent with a girl he met on the internet.

He will have been in his early twenties at this point, and i remember him telling me that he’d met this girl online on a forum discussing necrophilia, and in particular the disturbing and recent media attention surrounding the man Nick Mohammed, who apparently, has been digging up dead bodies in the dead of night and having his way with them for years. She was gothic and she was self abusive, but Madison said that she was also into the same sexual deviances as him, and was more-or-less the same age. Apparently, she turned up at his apartment; they started drinking glasses of cognac and talking about various kinds of armpit fetishes, and before long she started taking her clothes off, slowly, while he watched from the opposite sofa. To his overwhelming pleasure, her pale white skin was adorned with scars of cuts and burns, running all the way along her arms, and most dense around her thighs, and as she removed her underwear, he realised that her vagina was cut up too. So, after this he said he fucked her; up against the wall, on the floor for what must have been hours – he was hard as a moose for her body, but then she started biting him, only a little hard at first, then as she grew steadily more excited, she became much more fierce and even though he told her to stop, she wouldn’t. I remember him telling me how she bit him so hard, that she actually ripped a chunk of flesh out of his lower back (he still had the scar to prove it) and when she did this, he swung at her, and hit her, hard on the head. When she fell to the floor, he sat on her, so she couldn’t get up, and hit her on the head again. He said that, in a drunken rage, he held her arms down, and bit her cheek, malevolently, but she laughed and tried to bite him back again, loving every second of this escalating violence. He lashed out again, punching her in the lower stomach this time, then stood and started to stamp. During this whole show, so he says, she was laughing hysterically, in a drunken state, but she was also, he noticed, wet, aroused by the experience.

He didn’t kill her, just hurt her bad; she could walk home (though it must have been painful), and though he didn’t speak to her afterwards, he knows she would have needed surgery, not on her arms or legs, but on her ass, because he had bit her hardest there. Madison did get his dog, but i think on realising early on that it would never be capable of fulfilling the hopes and aspirations he had always had for it, he drowned it in a canal near to my house, then, because he enjoyed it so much, bought another puppy and did it again.