Kai Kay
Chapter 3: The Poems
Sunday, 9:45 P.M.
Jim dropped the crime scene pictures on the coffee table and sank into his couch. He took a long sip out of his coffee mug and scanned the scattered pile of evidence spread across his table. He no longer needed to clean up now that he had the entire place for himself.
He inhabited a house in the suburbs, big enough for a family of four. Mary insisted he could continue living there while she moved into a one-person apartment in Manhattan. Jim wished they could switch. The suburbs were never his style.
He picked up a sheet of paper with a typed-down four-line poem, the Sunday Killer’s first, and read through it.
Me
I forget home
Washing ashore
To kill
“Let me guess. Someone said you couldn’t be a poet so you went straight down to insanity town? Talk about taking criticism."
He scoffed, abandoning the letter on the table and moving on to skim through the pictures of the first crime scene. He picked up one. It showed a mother, a father, and their three-month old child. At the bottom was the name The Pattersons.
“It’s been three years,” said Jim, “What have you been doing all this time? What brought you back? Why now?”
He flipped through the rest of the pictures and landed on one with a close-up of the parents as they were found in the crime scene. Their faces were merged into each other, stitched together from the cheek down to the chest. Another picture showed the baby hanging down the ceiling. No hands. No legs. The first time he saw it, Jim had gagged.
“What kind of a psycho does this to a kid?”
He moved on to another picture, this time of the second victims. The lesbian couple, Beverly and Jill. The bodies were found buried under the sand from the neck down. Another angle showed the bodies after they have been dug out. They were naked. Stitching signs on the heart and abdominal regions, where the hearts were removed and the baby limbs implanted.
"Too much mutilation and damage. Too much hatred inside you. You’re sick."
He threw the pictures with an irritated groan, then searched through the pile to find what he was looking for. The second poem. It was sent before Beverly and Jill’s bodies were found.
You
I forget you
A curse
Is urging me
“We know you’re smart. We know you know what you’re doing. Now tell me, what kind of metaphor is this bullshit supposed to mean?”
He put the two poems next to each other and spent the next hour researching types of poetry to no avail. The stanzas were not a match to any of the widely known forms, which left it to be categorized under Free Verse. That didn’t bring Jim any closer to the motive.
“All right, let’s dig up the similarities."
He pushed his laptop aside and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes on the table, trying to pierce the mystery of the two poems.
“No rhymes. The first line is composed of one word, which can potentially be the title. Both poems start with I forget in the second line…”
He stopped to re-read the poems to himself, over and over again until the words began to lose their meaning. He then pulled a sheet of paper and scribbled down the poems’ four verses side by side.
“No. This sounds even more odd,” he grunted, tearing apart his poor excuse of a mismatch poem. “The last line would make more sense if it was reversed.”
He decided to repeat the process, this time starting with the second poem. He scribbled down his findings on a new sheet of paper sheet.
You Me
I forget you I forget home
A curse Washing ashore
Is urging me To kill
"Is urging me to kill," Jim read out loud.
Then it clicked in his head. He grabbed the original poems in haste, looking for his answer through the lines.
“What if they were never written separately? What if they’re stanzas part of the same poem? Just like the murders are the work of the same killer. You’re feeding us stanza by stanza. Murder by murder. Meanwhile, you have them all planned. All stanzas. All murders. The whole poem. The whole massacre.”
Jim couldn’t sleep that night. With one persistent question pending in his head.
What is urging you to kill?