Day 1 (True Crime)

Never hit your grandma with a shovel. If I had to say or share anything to teach a lesson, this would be mine to tell the world. I recall sometime after the sun rose on the Wednesday of a certain week, I was watching a True Crime documentary in the comfort of my shack of an apartment. And I have to emphasize the nature of this kind of show, the crime scenes depicted are always both brutal and mysterious. It’s called “True Crime” for a reason. It’s not some pointless convenience store armed robbery where the perpetrator has the combined intelligence of a cell wall and an alcoholic constantly hovering at a .35% blood alcohol content, nor is it drive-by shootings that always appear on the news with the suspect caught and tried minutes after the crime happened after one look at the vehicle’s license plate through a blurry street camera.

“True Crime,” spotlights crime planned for months and months, the criminals thinking of every possible scenario and taking counter-action against every single one of them. A crime that goes unsolved for years and years for no apparent reason, even if the act was as simple as a heist to steal a hundred grand worth of gold. For that reason, they fascinate me. What do they do? How do they get away with their actions so flawlessly to go unnoticed for so long? These questions kept me foaming at the mouth.

Like any avid fan of this addicting show, the urge to try a crime like this of my own eventually overtook all of my morally righteous self after this one episode of a barn murder. Farmer Ben was the perpetrator, his tax collector the victim. It begins like any old episode, a middle-aged narrator retelling the events in his most deep and dramatic voice while the events are reenacted by paid actors, fully edited in darkened filters and fast cuts. As the narrative moves forward, things escalate, Farmer Ben starts yelling, and as the tax collector starts to also get impatient and steps inside the house, Farmer Ben grabs a shovel and slams twice on the collector’s head, caving his head in and killing the man. While this may seem like the world’s most braindead case of murder, the way Farmer Ben handled the crime scene was almost subliminal, otherwise, it wouldn’t have been “True Crime.” He hosed down the floorboards and hid the body, that’s a given, but he never fled the scene. He kept living in the house as if nothing happened. He was unfazed, only seeming a bit happier because he didn’t have to pay taxes.

No one questioned him. He made it seem like the tax collector died in an accident with nature by acting like he usually does and expressing his condolences when his victim was ever mentioned. To the world, no one suspected old Farmer Ben.

And from the messy and seemingly random series of happenings out of raw human emotion, the fact that it was kept a secret for so long gave me beautiful inspiration. It reminded me of a person who I had always resented. My evil, demonic, satanic grandmother from hell on my father’s side who I wanted gone, gone, gone from the world. It was a hate that reached far past the supposed “familial love” I am supposed to feel for my relatives.

I got up from my creaky and broken chair and paced around my room remembering all the horrible things she had done. The time she almost choked me to death as a baby by undercooking the peas and forcefully feeding the hard balls of rock into my mouth. The time she broke my leg because she made me stand on a stool that was too tall for my foot to make it in one step, risking permanent paralysis or even death from the way I fell on my legs and then my back. Or the most unforgivable offense where she forgot to pack my presentation script for my history final on the second to last day of school, where I had to endure endless laughter and berating from my peers and teachers, and an entire day where it felt like a boat’s propeller saw cut me into a hundred pieces.

Look at me now, all messy and broken. I live in a shack on a minimum wage job and it was all because of her. The failure of the presentation killed all of my motivation in pursuing a college degree. The broken leg murdered all my courage for risk-taking, and the three-second asphyxiation caused by the peas gave me enough brain damage to fail all my classes by my junior year of high school.

In my heart, there was no warmth or happiness for this woman. In fact, there was nothing about her where I would even recognize her as a family member. None. Zero. The tears I had cried were all real. Tears of genuine anguish, of pain that was greater than a starving child’s struggle for a bowl of food. All the blood rushed to my head, and my stomach descended like an accelerating roller coaster. I was livid, foaming at the mouth. I needed to make a ball with my fist and draw blood using my fingernails to pour the iced water on the melting stone that was burning inside of me. I was exploding and combusting within like a supernova, but with resolve, and after the massive wave of fury had passed, I slammed open all of my drawers to find the money. One of them gave out and stumbled to the floor, but I continued until all of them were overturned, and me 50 dollars richer. The floor was a mess of papers and broken wood but I continued out of the room and slipped on a coat. A black coat to express my suppressed hatred of the world.

I forced my way into my half-functioning car, another product of grandmother’s cruelty– rusted with a missing wheel and an engine loud enough to overpower a full symphony’s forte– and drove too quickly in the face of rush hour traffic. Half the blaring horn honks that evening was from my impatience, but it made the travel much faster and I eventually reached the department store faster than I thought was possible. I ran inside without locking my car and picked out the best shovel I could find. It was sharp and gleamed a heavenly silver. It was perfect.

From the time I spent walking to and from the shovel supply and the checkout line, I was thinking about the crime of Farmer Ben and his nemesis. I saw myself as Farmer Ben with his bushy beard and ruffled overalls, getting away with the crime from pure intuition and genius without prior planning. Thinking and fantasizing, I felt my face contort into a crooked grin, it was the perfect scenario for a person like me. I quickly bought the shovel and slid into my car once again, this time heading for the woods, where that woman has decided to live for the rest of her limited days.

I blazed past all traffic, taking the narrow rocky road at the side of the highway. The sides of the car screeched at the guardrails creating an uncomfortable shake, but I drove forward, ignoring the cacophony of car horns and angry screamers. I was determined to end it all no matter what.

I crashed into the road that led to her house, tumbling through the uneven rocks and scattered tree branches until I saw her driveway to which I turned a very sharp right. And as the car moved with my bidding, creating loud crackling friction, I jumped out of my vehicle, shovel in hand, and ran to the front door. Panting from the stress building up the entire ride, I rang the doorbell to a response from an old woman. The minute I heard the familiar voice, I pounced like a beast, and with full force, I swung at the demon that has plagued my life for so long.

Once

Twice

Thrice

Four times

Five times

I made sure that she never saw the light of day again. My arms moved like the barbarians in dramatic Greek films, mindlessly slashing until my rage cooled like a bowl of hot soup. I felt the weight of all these years lifts off my shoulders. I felt ascended and godlike. No, I was above even the gods with the euphoric pleasure that I felt by getting rid of this leech who ruined my life from this world.

But as my eyes opened to see the results, she was still there. Standing unfazed with a cup of tea in her hands. Her mouth was twisted into a frown,

“Such an ungrateful grandson” was what I heard her say before I felt spasms throughout my entire body, a pain comparable to being strapped on a board and having perpetually burning cast iron skillets pressed onto my skin. I writhed in pain but moved nowhere. And as the excruciating minutes ticked by, the world slowly disappeared before my eyes and eventually darkened into a single dot of color. Inside was an image, of the outside world. But as I tried to move towards it, it only drifted further and farther away like chasing a fleeting butterfly.

Though I never knew at the moment, I was compressed into nothing more than a singular dot, a conscious spectator of the world that I once participated in. I can only float around without control of direction, seeing the world and aging slowly as my vision also starts to deteriorate. I cursed Farmer Ben. I cursed “True Crime” and every twisted thought that had stemmed from watching the show. For days, my sight was blurry from the tears of regret that I constantly shed. And as the years also ticked past, I became nothing but a wanderer. Watching the life that I will never have because of a singular mistake I made when I was young and full of primal emotion.

And this is the lesson I want everyone in this world to take to heart, and I stress this lesson above everything else. Never hit your grandma with a shovel. You will regret it for the rest of your life.