Armchair Killers
At quiet time, during the television, under the light, we sit and become armchair killers. I from the front, you from behind, hand on your knee. It is through this domesticated, regurgitated conversation, that we suspend the need to distinguish between crimes of passion, and the need to change something irreparably. It bits our human drive to perversity, to salvage a little something from the dark.
Nightly we stray to this conversation: not because we couldn’t say anything more, but because we wanted to say anything more, and couldn’t. Words swing, hands swing, suspension under heavier light.
Under the deco chandelier – bought with you in St Johns Wood – we tell each other all about how we would kill those that are not here. This baubled metronome counts away these evenings, light sidelong above the grey velvet upon which we sit.
Sit.
And grip.
We mouth upon thought-murders with a smile, and with the acknowledgement that these things will never happen. Things that our bodies are capable of, the shutting of the mouth, the twist around the neck, but that our hands, and our minds couldn’t quite, couldn’t quite manage. Yet the thought of changing the world irreparably through murder is easier than the thought of changing it irreparably through love. Certainly it is more believable.
I haven’t told you how your face strikes me when you’re sleeping, or how sometimes I doubt whether there is depth to love. I tell you that I would kill from the front. I read you the hundred and thirty first dream song, (and listen to you struggle, then dismiss the verse), and tell me of your fascination with Christie, and of the history, and of your methods. Strangles mostly.
– Kate Pfeffer
