WHY I KILLED JOHNNY
I sat in the red chair, where I always sat, and Johnny drip dropped the paper in front of me, folded so invisible except the headline, SCIENTISTS CURE THE IMPOSSIBLE, and I could imagine what the picture looked like. I saw in my mind’s eye a man in a blue-grey blazer, his eyes seeing horizons far beyond my restrictive own, his legs squeezed into trousers of some tough black material, ending, out of shot, in pointed brown shoes, with feet facing outward. I looked up from the paper to see Johnny, uncannily close to what I had imagined, his eyes darting seemingly independently from above a stiff collar.
“How,’ I said to Johnny, “do you get your hair to look like that?”
Yes, but do you remember three months earlier, which stretched out like a spine, that has since wound itself together? Those three months changed my life, and as a result, several (possibly twenty) seconds after talking to Johnny, I pulled a knife from the cushion on which I sat (which itself was placed on the wood floor) and plunged it into his chest with such ferocity that the noise of its entrance overpowered that of his screams.
Three months earlier, we had been in almost identical positions. As always, I was in the red chair when Johnny came in, a paper in his hand, a pop bottle that now contained fruit squash poking out of his bag, and his other hand reached in, took it out, undid the lid, he held it to his lips but he didn’t drink.
“Like all writers,” said Johnny, lowering the bottle from his lips and placing it at thigh height, “ you wish that I was a beautiful woman, who would enter and, finding themselves transfixed and overpowered by the sight of your artistic process, press her lips to yours.”
At this point I knew he had to die.
13 Jul 2008 12:40
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keira
ben
i really like the end best
ill talk to you when i see you about your story
13 Jul 2008, 14:35
Sue
I was talking about knife crime yesterday with my brother in law. Someone was saying “I don’t know why these people don’t make something of their lives instead of going around intimidating peole with knives.” And he said “The trouble is they think they don’t have anything to look forward to.” I had just been listening to a programme on the radio in my car on the way to see them which I found very interesting and I told them what I had heard. It was (and I didn’t catch who was speaking) “If you go around carrying a knife, you’re likely to be knived yourself and so you’ll either end up in prison or dead.” He agreed that statistics showed this to be true and that people who carry knives are far more likely to be knived than people who don’t carry them. But his point about a lack of a future which they see as worth looking forward to is still a valid one and as someone else then said “They don’t seem to put much value on life.”
Later we went on to talk about the new I-phone and how people had been queuing up in droves to get one, some of them only to find that they had got to the front of the queue to find they had sold out. He needs several I-phones for his business and told the man in Carphone Warehouse that he wasn’t interested in queuing up for hours on end and would have been happy to put his name on a waiting list so that he could be contacted when the ones he wanted became available but bizarrely this facility didn’t exist. The other thing that he found totally ludicrous is that the manager of the shop told him that his shops had sold out of all 13,000 that went on sale in the first 5 minutes of the shops opening. He seemed to think this was something to be proud of when in fact it showed their incompetence at not being able to meet customer demand.
13 Jul 2008, 14:42
You killed Johnny??
26 Sep 2008, 14:48
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