I would like to start by saying, there are a lot of bad people in the world, but I am certainly not in their company. I am a good person. I recycle, I pay my taxes and I donate to the LGBTQ Youth shelter downtown.
For Craig to call me a turd, if it weren't so impossibly ironic, was audacious.
I wasn't in my right mind, but I assure you, he got what was coming to him. I had to protect myself.
A turd!
I didn't think it was him, but I heard it. That's what his voice said to me, but that wasn't possible. Still, it must have been him because there was no one else around who could have said it:
“Hey you!” his voice broke out, a shrill phantom, shivering through the chilly air of December. It had been quiet on my walk out here and startled, I dropped the bundles I'd been carrying to the ground. They scattered haphazardly at my feet with seven hollow thumps. I looked around, wondering who else it could have been. How? Who spoke those words in his voice when there was no other soul around?
“Me?” I whispered.
“Yes you!” The voice said again from near my feet, “stop being a turd.”
I nealt down next to the collection of garbage bags and hissed: “I’m a turd? Shut up you horrible sack of shit!”
There was no way he could be speaking at all. Craig was well and truly dead. I'd seen to that, for sure. I kicked the black plastic Hefty I supposed might hold his head. It was hard to tell which parts were in which bags in the dark, as I walked out to this place, the clouds had blown in from off-shore like a tide of waves in the sky and I remembered the weather report predicted rain; I could smell it swirling down from the starless heights as it commingled with the salt that rose from the black waters of the sea.
I could not hear what I was supposed to do next. The moon was too obscure. I really just wanted to go home and back to bed.
“You'll never get away with this, turd.” Said Craig's head.
“It was self defense.” I said.
“It started that way, I guess.” Said Craig through layers of opaque polyethylene. I looked up and begged the sky for a roll of duct tape. I should have taped him quiet. “I shouldn't have been in your house, sure. But times are tough. You didn't have to get the skillsaw out and cut me up. I was already dead. You're gonna fry.”
I ignored him as well as I was able to do, but he kept on.
“The postmortem screwdriver in my eyes was pretty extreme too.” I was looking up to the sky and from my lower periphery, I could see the bag clearly now. Moving, plastic pressed against his mouth, Craig resembled some sort of macabre puppet, a dark moving silhouette within the bag of neck and head. “You should have stopped after you snuck up and stabbed me. That would have been enough.”
“Snuck up!?” He was being ridiculous. “You were in my house, fucktard. What were you doing in there anyway?”
“Thought I could get something I might be able to hock.” He said, “I don't have a lot of scratch right now.”
Nothing to do with your drug problem, I thought, but kept it to myself, though I know not why. There wasn't anything he could do about any of this now. Maybe I just didn't want to listen to him deny it when it was pretty plain for everyone to see.
He continued: “the stab was the self-defense. The rest was a bit excessive. A jury's gonna send you right to hell. I'll save you a spot, Thomas Vale.”
“Don't say my name!” I hissed. “Someone might hear you!”
“THOMAS VALE! THOMAS VALE! HEY EVERYBODY THOMAS VALE! I'M DEAD FROM THAT GUY.”
I stomped on the bag with my heel and he let out a yelp. “I said shut up.” He needed to be quiet. I didn't know what to do next and with the clouds billowing above and his stupid garbage face, I couldn't hear the moon.
It only told me to come here. It didn't say what was next.
“THOMAS VALE THE TURD!”
“You're the turd.” I said, “you leave empty garbage cans at the curb, and play music too loud.”
He snorted. He called me 'Grandpa Turd.’
So I chucked all seven of the garbage bags that held him into the inlet. I started with the head and I could still hear him gurgling out insults on his way down. Fuck you, Craig. Eat shit in your watery grave…
But it was a mistake. I didn't realize it until too late when the sky cleared and the moon spoke once again in my head.
”They'll find him there on Sunday.” It said. ”You'll have to dive down and fish him out. There is a kayak in the bushes ahead. You were meant to row him out a bit.”
That would have been nice to know moments ago, but now I was just about done with this business, besides I didn't want to get wet. I headed back to my car instead. Irony is a little bitch when she rears her head because just as I came in range for the fob to unlock my door, it began to pour.
Fuck both of them. My asshat prowler neighbor Craig and the Moon for leading me to this.
I decided to drive myself to the police station instead. Well, maybe I will. I stopped on the way to think. I might just go home. Who even knows if the Moon is right? Maybe they'll never find him…and if they do, maybe I'll be able to fake insanity well enough to convince a jury.