Killer Compulsion

1.) If you were able to kill the person you hated most, how would you go about killing them?
2.) In the moment before you have to come up for air after being underwater, what are you thinking?
3.) Describe your ideal apocalypse.

DISCLAIMER: Just because I'm writing about a boy picturing the brutal murder of one of his classmates does not reflect on any latent desire of my own to do the same. I like you guys quite a bit, and I don't want to see you dead. I just have a fascination with serial killers and the following story has to do with that. I actually plan on writing a book about a teenage boy with the potential to become a serial killer, so I used this assignment as a means of exercising that idea. The psychology of serial killers fascinates me, and I want to be able to write about how they think and what it's like being in their heads. Just because I like reading about them doesn't mean I want to become one, so no need to worry. You guys are rad.

It was the most brutish of the herd.

Oh, they all taunted when they thought he couldn't see them - as if he couldn't see, as if he couldn't hear, as if he couldn't read their lips and know and seethe and force down the urge - and they were all frightened of him. It was no different in that regard. The only way in which it stood out was that it mocked the most, mocked the loudest.

Of course, he would act as though he hadn't heard and continue picking at his cuticles with a pair of tweezers. (He never stopped until all his cuticles had been ripped out completely, the moons of his fingers gleaming crimson until he sucked them clean.) The nature of the beast was a simple one, and almost always his lack of response to its taunting would eventually drive it into silence. Even so, its words dug into him. (A cuticle flutters to the floor, red welling up in its place. Warmth flares up inside of him and he greedily licks his pinky back to health.) Its words fed the blaze, carbon dioxide instead of oxygen being the crucial ingredient to the flame. He was a pyromaniac, he relished the burn, so he didn't mind.

He would think of its words when he went home after school, the bell directing the herd onto buses and into cars. He always walked home, taking the long route so as to prolong the inevitable. Pushing past the screen door hanging on its hinges, he would unlock the deadbolt and be immediately greeted by more tinder. He disregarded their words just as he did with everything else's and went upstairs. His fingers ached.

The smell of his room was always a comforting one, a perfume of stale urine, smoke, and blood. Here he would sit, drifting in and out of hallucinatory epiphanies, and contemplate its death. The urges inside of him would stir and he would fidget accordingly, be it lighting and extinguishing matches or pricking himself with a needle.

He would picture it vividly. Dragging the blade of a pair of scissors across its neck, hearing it beg for mercy, seeing the helplessness in its eyes and knowing that he had it under his complete control. It couldn't escape, couldn't prevent him from slicing, stabbing, cutting a Glasgow smile from ear to ear.

As a souvenir, he would take its lips. No longer would it be able to taunt him.

He would leave its corpse for the rest of them to find. He would smile inwardly at the thought of their horror when they laid eyes upon the beautiful scene. Their eyes would widen with shock at the site of their herd mate dressed like the beast it was, like they all were.

He would finish the night with a delighted shiver of imagined carnage, touch his own chapped and bruised mouth and imagine what it would be like to hold its lips within his hand. He would sleep lightly, as he always did, and wake to the sound of his own terrified shouts, his legs slick and stinking with fear and bloodshot eyes streaming at imagined horrors lurking in the corners of his room and boiling inside of him.

When he reconvened with the herd the next morning, he would eye its lips hungrily as he chewed on his own. He would clutch a pair of scissors by the blade, his grip tightening until red welts arose on his palms. Sometimes he feared the impulse would become too great and it would happen, that they would all become motionless flesh in his arms, heavy and weighed down with blood. Who was he to not slit them open and ease them of that burden?

Throughout the rest of the day he would gnaw at his bottom lip and glance furtively at its mouth and its eyes, studying it. Though he despised it, he grew to love its lips. Ugly and puffy though they were, they had a certain charm to them.

The scissors sat temptingly on his desk, blades stained with bodily rust and provoking his compulsions. One day, he knew the need would win and he would be helpless to resist.

At least he would get a lovely pair of lips out of the deal.