Prosecution Exhibit B
I'd never seen a dead body before, much less a mutilated murder victim.
The square room was lined with slate gray steel shelves filled with stacks of sin and misery, abuse and death. It was a ten-year-old picture, inside a Verbatim Record of Trial volume with 14 companions in a room filled with other old pictures, files, and histories to be destroyed or saved by my hands. The pictures were what you looked for in the ROTs, a pick-me-up, a visual firecracker that accompanied the testimony or the sworn statements.
I'd never seen a dead body before, much less a mutilated murder victim. What's the first thing you look at, besides the wound? For me, it was the eyes of the woman in the picture, the dead fish glaze of them that drew me. Her eyes were blue and wide with fear. If her mouth was frozen in a silent scream or a plea for the redemption of her flesh, those eyes left no doubts about the grace of heaven.
She was naked and stretched, crawling and grasping at the bed sheets, frozen that way for days or weeks. Amounts of blood like I'd never imagined stained the blue sheets purple and made them brittle. Her blood marred her entire body with the dried rust flakes of her life. Her copper hair was matted with blood, and it hung in stringy clumps across her face and down her back. Her mouth was open, drawn back to the gash in her cheek that made her mouth that much wider. The expression on her face gave her vitality, like you might place a bandage on her wound and she might blink and sit up, but a man I would never meet had nearly sawed her head off. The white bone of her neck gleamed through the sticky blood and the hanging ends of severed muscle and trachea. She was a rag doll, used and hacked and cast aside. The horror, stark reality revealed, left me speechless, excited. I could taste bile rising in the back of my throat but I couldn't decide whether I was about to throw up or furiously masturbate.
The authorities thought she might have been tortured, but the murderer offered no explanation or excuse and got life in prison, caged like an animal but alive unlike his victim. In the ten years it had taken me to get to this room and looking at this picture he'd been moved somewhere else, and was someone else's problem. Nobody wanted this old record, which was why I was here now. Keep it? For posterity? That would be silly. Destroy it. Throw it away. Who cares?
Dead and forgotten all this time, locked away in a little room with shelves filled with the records of child molesters, rapists and murderers, one of a million photos of violated pre-teen vaginas, stab victims and glamour shots of offenders posing with their tiny penises and this woman, with her nearly-severed head, her glazed eyes and dead, grasping claws left me knowing that there is no God.
I'd never seen a dead body before, much less a mutilated murder victim. What's the first thing you look at, besides the wound? For me, it was the eyes of the woman in the picture, the dead fish glaze of them that drew me. Her eyes were blue and wide with fear. If her mouth was frozen in a silent scream or a plea for the redemption of her flesh, those eyes left no doubts about the grace of heaven.
She was naked and stretched, crawling and grasping at the bed sheets, frozen that way for days or weeks. Amounts of blood like I'd never imagined stained the blue sheets purple and made them brittle. Her blood marred her entire body with the dried rust flakes of her life. Her copper hair was matted with blood, and it hung in stringy clumps across her face and down her back. Her mouth was open, drawn back to the gash in her cheek that made her mouth that much wider. The expression on her face gave her vitality, like you might place a bandage on her wound and she might blink and sit up, but a man I would never meet had nearly sawed her head off. The white bone of her neck gleamed through the sticky blood and the hanging ends of severed muscle and trachea. She was a rag doll, used and hacked and cast aside. The horror, stark reality revealed, left me speechless, excited. I could taste bile rising in the back of my throat but I couldn't decide whether I was about to throw up or furiously masturbate.
The authorities thought she might have been tortured, but the murderer offered no explanation or excuse and got life in prison, caged like an animal but alive unlike his victim. In the ten years it had taken me to get to this room and looking at this picture he'd been moved somewhere else, and was someone else's problem. Nobody wanted this old record, which was why I was here now. Keep it? For posterity? That would be silly. Destroy it. Throw it away. Who cares?
Dead and forgotten all this time, locked away in a little room with shelves filled with the records of child molesters, rapists and murderers, one of a million photos of violated pre-teen vaginas, stab victims and glamour shots of offenders posing with their tiny penises and this woman, with her nearly-severed head, her glazed eyes and dead, grasping claws left me knowing that there is no God.