Out of all the many, many people who saw the events that occurred at number forty-eight Durgallary Road, at the Western end of Reichenstag in greater Heitghur, the third Saturday of January in a leap-year during the twentieth-century’s final decade, the late madam-frau Maud Wilhelm van der Gruet saw, perhaps, more than any other. Frau Wilhelm was by all accounts a horrible grouch, a terrible neighbour, and a generally mean-spirited human being. The local children called her names in secret, things like ‘stinky alien-witch’ and ‘pooey old cunt’. Such vulgarity was also frequently muttered amongst the adults: once the children were put to bed the adults speculated – in post-coital confidence – that she had no soul, less patience, and was basically just a real bitch.
Unbeknownst to the Wilhelm-haters of Haighbury, Maud was (amongst many other things) a brilliant jazz pianist, a worthy Nobel chemistry candidate, and a time-traveller. During her lifetime of roughly forty-nine-and-a-half thousand Earth sols, frau Wilhelm had visited intermittently across a span of years nearing seventy-thousand. Not just a jazz pianist but accountable for Palaeolithic bone instruments, and music. Not just a pioneering would-be chemist laureate, no! But singularly responsible for the advance of ferrous alloy metallurgy across the ancient world. The subsequent shift from bronze to steelwork favourability caused by the madam-frau Wilhelm so-saved mankind: in the eleventh-century BCE, the Invasion of the Cannivers was defended against and felled – thanks be to well-worked steel and tempered interference, and thus many millennia ahead were saved from the bloodlust, the self-destruction, and the hatred that was once caused by our submission to the Cannivers, later known as evil. But the thing with humans, Maud lamented, was that they were so completely and utterly useless. Odious. Absolutely reprehensible. A right pack o’ cunts. Thinking they do such good, when in fact they do not! No – despite the time-traveller madam-frau Maud Wilhelm van de Gruet’s efforts at sage guidance and her gift of temporal revisitation, the attempted salvation of humanity was inherently doomed. Where one catastrophe was avoided with assistance, humanity simply stumbled sideways into another of equal or greater threat. It was as if homo sapiens were by default cerebrally retarded, bow-legged toddlers, and already the crackling yellow flames were licking at every inch of skin, even before she tripped…
And she always tripped.
Perhaps if she had not seen otherwise, and perhaps if humanity had not embittered every taste-bud on her tongue already, perhaps Maud really might have believed that Mrs Morris had indeed just tripped and, oh: what a terrible accident! But that was the thing with humans. Out of the many, many people who saw Mrs Morris go limp when Mr Morris head-butted her on the front lawn of their home at number forty-eight Durgallary Road, only three people watched on as Mrs Morris’ stationary head met repeatedly with Mr Morris’ size-eleven steel-capped work-boot. From everywhere within the house blasted a deafening, distorted, symphonic rendition of Violent Femmes Blister in the Sun.
In the next one-minute and seven-seconds of uninterrupted domesticity, Mrs Morris became lawn mulch: an unrecognisable copper-brown mush now covered the yard. Several neighbours walked off muttering about roses, roast chicken and the like – as Mrs Morris’ head caved in.
One father said, quite loudly, “Oh yes, I must be off to pick up Benjamin from tennis practice,” and he walked with composure to the car parked in the drive of number fifty-six, got in and drove away, in fact leaving Benjamin in the street to watch the carnage. He drove aimlessly, angrily. He called himself a faggot for the tears that fell: they were confusing and betrayed his stoicism.
Madam-frau Wilhelm and Benjamin the boy both watched Mrs Morris die, and they both felt pretty much the same way about the woman’s death. Maud lacked compassion for Mrs Morris, and was instead filled with hatred for the perpetrator. Benjamin lacked compassion altogether: his hatred for women was organic and immense and sickly. He was angry at Mr Morris for having all the fun.
They both detested the racket coming from inside, how it pierced their ears and muddled their minds. The third person who watched the murder on the lawn was named Egbert Filsnick, and it was Egbert Filsnick who was in fact responsible for the death of Mrs Morris; for the distorted mind of young Benjamin, and his father’s fear and anger; for the plight of the human, and names they called the Bitch-Wilhelm. Egbert Filsnick was a Canniver. As the madam-frau finally gave in to her rage and flew at Mr Morris, and as Benjamin’s father crashed into the town hall at high-speed, and while Benjamin pulled out his prepubescent cock and cut it with his pocket knife, the Canniver grinned with unadulterated satisfaction, flash-jumped to the side of frau Wilhelm, stuck a seven-inch bronze blade into her spine, and whispered, “mum, you pooey old cunt, it's me.”
Part Two Wed 12th.
Original artwork to come.
[Image sourced freely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/]