Murder Cabinet

THE FILING CABINET OF DOOMdoomcabinet

Swan, Madeleine (Burning Bulb Publishing, July 2013, ISBN 9780692245200)

I got the Murder Cabinet at Vincent Raux Second-hand Furniture on Clayton Road. Inside the shop it looked like any other sheet metal filing cabinet. It had four working drawers, less rust than the Carpentaria, and smelled no worse than the shop itself. They kept it against a wall. That should’ve tipped me off. I didn’t behold the stain until I got it home.

A wide, blotchy stain streaked down the back. Thickest and blackest at the bottom, it thinned into a carmine cracklature at the top. As Colin expressed it, you could never quite convince yourself you looked at something other than blood. From another room you could laugh that your imagination must’ve got the better of you, that next time when you looked, you would just see brown paint. But when you got there, you couldn’t shake the impression that you saw blood. Continue reading

El Shaddai

BOOK OF EXODUSHoly Bible

Chapter 21 (Holy Bible, ISBN for example 9780060649234)

Without any warning, my neighbour put three poodles in his yard. He went from none to three in a single black afternoon. After that he paid them little attention. As far as you could tell, they never left the yard. From morning until night they bombarded the neighbourhood with shrill barrages of barking that tore your concentration in two. They’d cease just long enough to let you collect your thoughts back together before shattering them again with the next barrage.

When home, their owner would bawl at them to shut up from behind his screen door. On other evenings, enraged neighbours assumed the role. It seemed like just a matter of time before some neighbour rationalised euthanizing them with poisoned meatballs. Continue reading

Tony Vu

TOP GUN tgun
Dir. Tony Scott Perf. Tom Cruise and Tim Robbins. Paramount Pictures, 1986 Film.
At Yolande’s insistence, a hairdresser shaved my beard in 2009. This shows what I looked like beforehand:

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