 "For
Love I Am Tormented"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
He truly loved them with all his heart,
but he couldn’t stop himself. When he’d pulled the ski mask on, knowing
the monstrous horrors he was about to commit, he collapsed into racking
sobs.
He waited for twenty-two-year-old Jill
that first night in her back seat, like a B-movie pastiche. He watched as
she moved through the parking garage, impossibly seductive in her nurse’s
outfit. Once she was out of the city, he surprised her with cold steel
against her throat.
She begged for her life, not knowing he
could never cut her; he was terrified of blood. He kept cool and forced
her to drive out of town, into the hills, and he took her in the back
seat. He bit his lip while she cried, so he wouldn’t cry with her. That
night at home, he bawled until dawn.
Miranda was twenty. Everyone was wary
after Jill’s attack, but nobody really believed it could happen again. She
was walking to her car after a college night class when he hauled her into
the woods with a vicious promise to slit her throat if she made a sound.
The very image of blood caused him to retch, to swallow his own vomit. But
she didn’t know that. He tied her face-first to a tree, so she couldn’t
see his streaming tears as he violated her. He hated every single moment
that he loved so much.
He called the police later so they’d find
her there. He screamed into his pillow all night, begging a thousand gods
to kill him, so he wouldn’t have to suffer anymore.
He lasted just one week before he took
Emily, the high-schooler, when she came out to throw away trash in the
burger joint’s dumpster. He couldn’t chance her screaming with so many
people just inside, so he knocked her out—without drawing blood, of
course.
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But there's more to this tortured
torturer than meets the eye. To find out more about how he deals with his
personal hell, visit
here.
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This is a short-short that has offended a few editors
(whenever you have a protagonist who is uncontrollably raping women, some
very young, that
makes a lot of them cower and cringe and never want to look at your work
again), but not the Chiaroscuro folks. As noted with my first
Chiaroscuro sale, 