The Swan Killer

[Loch Dawg]

This is my SSOTM entry, I forgot to add that in the tagline. Please, enjoy!

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There is a line from a book that says ‘with a gun stuck in your mouth, you speak only in vowels’. I feel like if I say this right now it could lighten the mood, but there is a gun stuck in my mouth and I have the assumption that when I try and force sounds out of my mouth, rather than a reference to literature, a trail of pathetic sounding vowels will dribble out and the meaning and its relevation to this current situation will be lost.

 

The barrel of the gun is cold, it tastes strange on my tongue but I’m sure you don’t care about that, I’m sure you’d like to know why I am here and that is an excellent question.

 

Why am I here? This the question that needs answering. I am here because a country boy from out west who had dreams of being a big shot lawyer met a city girl who was plagued with a series of abusive relationships until she finally met someone who treated her right. They married and engaged in intercourse and then nine months later there I was being held by a doctor. I want to describe my birth as something cliche, like the doctor yanks me out and holds me by the legs and says that I am his greatest catch but I won’t because people hate cliches.

 

I am here because of poor life choices, because I asked too many questions. There is a conspiracy here and I am going to stop it. The president will shake my hand and he will say ‘Good job son, you saved America again’, and then I will be whisked away by men in suits. I am hunting a dangerous serial killer and I finally have him cornered.

 

‘The Swan Killer’, they called him because he left an origami swan at every scene. His first victim was a kid I went to high school with. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies. He never really spoke to me and that sort of drove me insane because I was always trying to reach out to him. We use to do an origami class together but he would never really talk to me, I’d just try and force conversation out of him.

 

‘Oh look at those clouds its going to rain!’ I’d say, he’d grunt. We’d go back to total silence, was there something wrong with me?

 

More victims started appearing, all people who I graduated high school with. There was the prom queen, the football captain, the class president. I had to investigate why they were dying, who was doing this and why? I was pretty certain who it was.

 

This brings us to our current situation. After months of taking origami classes, playing Call of Duty only using a pistol (this was the killers favoured weapon) and setting up night patrols to watch the next possible victims I had finally got him, I had finally caught the famous ‘Swan Killer’.

 

I take the gun out of my mouth and scratch an itch on my forehead. I place back in my mouth, I have finally caught 'The Swan Killer' and he is going to get justice for killing all those innocent people!

 

I pull the trigger.

 

[Typhus]

Hmm, I am unsure of your intent. You start the story off by making reference to Fight Club and then go on to rip off both that story and elements of Heavy Rain. Was this because you lacked any good ideas of your own? Or an intentional joke? I noticed the line "people hate cliches" and wonder if you wanted us to hate this story, if your story was in itself a conspiracy. It left me cold, unimpressed and feeling vaguely contemptuous towards you. If that was your intention, this was a rather amusing story. If not, I can only advise you to reflect upon your own ideas a bit more, create your own stories, your own characters.

But, as I said, you may have been playing us all along. Technically speaking, it flowed very well and I have no problem with how you've actually written this story

[Rhoda]

The more I read Typhus' reply, the more he makes sense in that this was deliberately written to be a cliche, but not so that it makes you roll your eyes and think "this is tripe". There's more to it than that - every victim of The Swan Killer is a stereotype, and I pick more and more up with each read.

 

The simple answer? I like it a lot, and it certainly works if it is indeed intended to be smart. If we're reading too much into it, that's fine too, but it works so much better as a piece that challenges the very thing it set out to avoid.