Justifiable Homicide

The idea came to him near two am, and at nine he went into the library. He found the right shelf, grabbed the books, sat down and turned the dog-eared pages. He shook his head. Where was he going to find these odd herbs or a king snake egg? Maybe he could substitute an alligator lizard egg and some oregano for the foxglove. Maybe the Asian grocery store across town had it.

The next book recommended psychology. Picture yourself overcoming the enemy with the power of your mind. Bend its will to yours.

At home, he pulled out his Bible and checked the concordance. The references were few: the witch of Endor; God’s rebuke over Job; Michael’s triumph in Heaven; Jesus’ encounter with the Fiend in the wilderness.

“Get thee behind me,” he said, trying out the phrase.

He got a lizard egg from his nephew and made the concoction. He was supposed to pour it over his doorstep at midnight, but it was only eleven-thirty. He set it down, answered a couple emails and thought of something. He opened his long-neglected story and added a couple of hundred words. Cool. When he checked the clock in the tray it was 1:00AM. Oh well. He tossed the potion down the disposal.

The following morning he composed his strategy. Isolate the thing and kill it like the cockroach it was. He added another paragraph to his story, and returned to his plan. He imagined the thing squirming, its power over him draining away.

He ate lunch at his desk and emailed himself a few lines for his story, read his plan, and smiled.

That evening, he finished his plan and added a whole page to his story before he sat down on the living room floor. “Come on, you little coward.”

A pink creature jumped down from his back and puffed itself up to the ceiling. What in the world!? The writer clutched the rug to keep from running out of the house. “Who are you? Why are you torturing me?”

“You think you can get rid of me with a useless potion and a few empty phrases? I destroyed Chopin and Schumann and I can destroy you.” The thing’s voice sounded familiar, like an echo of a dream.

“I’m a good writer. I can start writing again any time.”

“Uh huh. Your stuff is crap and there’s pitiful little of it.”

“Yeah? I get rave reviews from people all the time.”

“What are they gonna say – ‘Your book is terrible.’? Besides, you wrote it ten years ago. You got nothin’ now. Admit it.”

The writer got up slowly and went to his laptop. The thing didn’t try to stop him. He read the plan and smiled. “I’m better than ever. I have more skills than I did ten years ago.”

“Whatever. The Diamondbacks are on TV. That’s more fun than writing, and you know it.”

True. Maybe he could watch a game for a few minutes, leave it on while he worked.

The being's pink belly swelled and its eyes glowed red.

He turned to his laptop again. His story was 1000 words longer than three days earlier. What if… “Get thee behind me!” He sat down and wrote some nonsense, and why he was frustrated. A new character, a foil to his hero, stepped onto the page. The writer glanced over at the being. It was as tall as his easy chair.

“C’mon, relax. Here’s the remote. You haven’t watched the news in a couple days.”

The new character, Darwin Kannady, was born in Australia in the 1960s. He came to the US in his twenties to work in the computer industry and learned mainframe hacks from the COBOL guys at IBM. He had neither friends nor wife. When he met Steve, whose business was about to be destroyed by a competitor with political connections, Darwin said he knew how to undercut the competitor’s machinations in Congress.

The thing walked under the table and tugged at his shorts. “You’re tired. A beer would be nice, or a shot of tequila. Calm you down and rev up that creative spirit. ‘Jose Cuervo, you are a friend of mine…’ You deserve it.”

Over beers and tequila, Darwin and Steve planned to bribe a Capitol Hill staffer to swap one page of the bill for another page that Darwin gave him. The legislation would say the exact opposite of the one the K Street lobbyist had written up. No one read the bills after they left the committee. Steve would later have second thoughts but Darwin was determined…

The imp ran up his leg and perched on his shoulder. “You want to kill me? Here, I’ll let you. I’ll scream and squirm like you planned. Just stop writing! Stop writing! Stop…”

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Write a short story, poem or essay (250 -500 words) on how much you hate Mr. Writer S. Block and the ways you’d like to kill “him” off. Be creative. Be descriptive. Have some fun with it. But, please, don’t get too gory.