Deathwish 004: Peter
“Every time I saw something die, it didn’t want to.”
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When I was a kid, I killed things. Not normal style, but really gross.
I smashed slugs with a rubber mallet. I poked paper clips into their breathing holes. I even took apart my mom's Dust Buster so it had this whirling circle of sharp edges, and I dropped worms into it. They got ground to bits, and whenever my mom fired up her Dust Buster, it stank like hell. Like earth and shit and something a little hot like when the blender gets overheated.
Worms and slugs don't know much. But they know they don't want to die. They slashed their bodies back and forth to get away from my little kid fingers.
I never killed anything bigger though. Well, that's not true.
When I was older, I killed a toad. It was cut in half when a car drove over it, drove through the sand towards the lake. The toad's front half was crawling away from the tire tread, away from its other half. The toad had nowhere to go, but it pulled at the sand with its front feet. It dragged the pale noodles of its own viscera through the sand. I put a shovel tip across its head, and I pushed hard.
I'm afraid of dying. Every time I saw something die, it didn't want to. Every time I saw something die, it didn't look right. Didn't look okay. It wasn't nice.
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Peter was born in Greeley, Colorado and still lives there today.