*

Alex used his novel's good reviews and the embers of his literary reputation to get a job at Tailor. Tailor was in the middle of Illinois, close enough for excursions into Chicago and St. Louis. And the surrounding dozing towns contained plenty of potential victims.

The literary world forgot Alex. His schizophrenia, and his tendency to assume victims' traits, often left him severely disorganized and even mildly disabled, as when he’d suddenly developed a victim’s arthritic hip or another victim’s dyslexia, or still another victim’s bulging goiter. These traits had to be wiped out with new traits of new victims, and the physiological and psychological grab bag could grow mighty dicey. These days, Alex could barely develop his ideas. Now he sat at his kitchen table, staring at his copy of The Best Year of His Life.

If I could just concentrate, just remember things, Alex mused, I could write again.

"How kind of you, Mr. Skillet," Alex murmured, recalling the story. It was about Orville, a rapist. One night, Orville was working in his garage when a woman approached. She lived down the road, she said, and had lost her dog.

Orville raped her.

Afterward, he lay on his back smoking a cigarette. "You think that sex and violence are the same," the woman accused through bloody lips. Orville agreed. He stabbed her a hundred times then buried her in his back yard.

The next night, someone knocked on his front door. The murdered woman, her ribboned throat glazed with dried blood and moist viscera, stood under his porch light. She pleaded with Orville to let her in. When Orville refused, she threw herself through Orville’s living room picture window.

She chased him through the house. She screamed repeatedly that Orville equated sex with violence. Finally she cornered Orville in his kitchen. She grabbed a carving knife. He covered his face with his arms, weeping. "I'm sorry! Sex and violence are not the same! They're different!"

The woman laughed. Her upper lip was nearly sheared from her mouth, and it dangled over the side of her jaw. "Just so you won't forget." She drove the knife into his stomach.

As Orville died, the woman's voice deepened into that of a man's.

Orville awoke in prison. He had been convicted of murdering a woman while she searched for a lost dog. As Orville lay on his cot, sweat-soaked prison garb clinging to his skin, his cellmate slapped him. Orville's eyes widened. A six foot five con with watery