Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
It took me a while to decide on the killing method. I’d chosen a bullet to the gut: it’s painful and it takes a while to bleed out, giving the person time to think about what they’d done. I’d had a lot of time to think about the method – I’d been hunting her for years. When I woke up I could smell her. I could taste her. I could hear her voice. But now, I had to find her. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I few times I caught up with her, only to have her evade me at the last moment. Or trick me into thinking I had her co-operation – that she understood the situation and would do her best to help me out. She was a liar and I learnt not to trust her. I searched long and hard. I’d looked for her everywhere – in London, in Perth, on holiday, on planes, on busses, in cars, on my bike, at the beach, in the park, in the pub, in my bed, on the toilet and in the shower.
I tore the world apart looking for her.
When I couldn’t find her anywhere, I went to work on myself.
I started with my guts. I cut open my stomach, slicing through the flesh, fat and muscle, and then I wrenched my intestines out. I worked my way along them, feeling every knot and bump. They were slightly small but still functioned. She wasn’t there so I moved on. I sawed open my skull, popped the top off then lifted out my brain. I unspooled it with my fingers and rummaged through it like I was separating spaghetti in a bowl. She wasn’t there. Next, I cracked open my chest, reached in and plucked out my heart. With blood streaming down my forearms I poked my thumbs into one side of the ventricles and watched them appear out the other side. I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until it pumped itself dry, nothing left but a lump of flesh. She was not there either. Perhaps she was somewhere more obvious. I looked at my hands. I cut my fingertips off and pulled back the skin down to my wrist. I opened and closed my fists and saw the tendons worked properly. I broke a finger, sucked out the marrow then spat it out like a child who’d been given the wrong flavoured jellybean. She was not there.
I placed my heart, brain and guts on the table in front of me and examined every last bit. I found nothing. I closed my eyes. When I opened them she was standing in front of me.
“You can never kill me,” she said. “Not with a bullet to the gut. Or by slitting my throat. Or tying weights around my feet and dumping me in the ocean. I am here to stay. I’m here to tell you all the things you need to hear; that you are wasting your time, what you write is crap, you are never going to finish, no one will want to read it. ”
She smiled. And in that moment I knew she was right. I would never kill her off. I would never beat her. She had been inside of me too many years.
“I can’t kill you,” I said. “But maybe I can keep you quiet for a while. Just long enough to do what I need to do.”
I picked up my brain and poured it back in my head. I took my guts and wrapped them around her body, tightly tying her hands together, palms not touching, giving her no room to move. I grabbed her head and forced her mouth open. I shoved my heart in her mouth until she started to gag.
I didn’t know how long I had – 10 minutes, an hour, a day, a week? At some time she would come unstuck and I would have to use my guts and heart to silence her all again.
But until then I had work to do. So I sat down at the computer and I wrote.