Vain Boasts and Confessions in Descending Mode

     My, but how that girl loved to defenestrate! I shall ever be grateful for my obstinacy with never living more than a single story above ground level. The two times she got me were just practice anyway, I hadn't even provoked her properly, not at that point. (If I'm to be defenestrated now, I'll have only holly bushes to endure.)

     Although she never embarked on any thriving homicidal career I ever learned of, I was taken with her practice by virtue of having been her victim twice (I missed the concrete down below the first time, by her design or no the ground was soft with saturation, the second time I landed in the dune next to a beach house on stilts and had nothing worse than sand spurs in my nostrils to complain of). I had only my memory to consult to realize instantly that defenestration is never prominent among cited causes either of death or of homicide. I always took this to mean that many many homicides were being conveniently concealed somehow, and now that my own homicidal career is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary, I simply felt the urge to crow just a bit.

     I confess to modesty: I've never dispatched more than four a year, but never fewer than two. (I have not kept count, actually, literary accounts that murderers keep score are not to be believed.)

     What I devoutly adore about defenestration, now that I take pains never to be its victim but only its perpetrator, is how simple gravity achieves its effect entire in the very act of the victim's plummeting to death. What I mean is, this fall into mortality will only continue into death, and this occurs, this fall into death, no matter what any victim's mode of death is: death is a continuous contraction and a falling inward until the vestige retaining any human form has evaporated entirely, I've seen it occur far too often only to chalk it up to coincidence.

     Since I'm in a boastful mode, I might boast, too, that one of my victims wound up in a plastination exhibit: I “donated” her on the basis of forged marriage papers. I think the plastination display was eager to illustrate tissue distension resulting from high impacts (crash victims, people hit by trains, people who innocently fell to their tragic deaths!). I only saw pictures, but I recognized her instantly.

     Another pedestrian inquiry: do I or why don't I consider hurling folks from the highest available building? While I admit my own aversion for what could easily turn into a public display of shameless theatricality, permit me to observe that earnest practitioners are well aware how critical timing is and can be in executing the successful unexpected defenestration: and face it, in any modern American city, you drop over six floors and you're as good as gone no matter what else occurs. No, I never see any need to take any elevator above the tenth floor, just a concession to prudence if nothing else.

     I don't know, maybe thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Women might well be the majority of my victims, but recall that they do comprise a majority of the general population.

     My favorite technique is the long red silk scarf: I still have the one durable scarf I bought in Edinburgh over a decade ago. Wrap her up in the scarf with all kinds of silly whispers and then zip! out the window! or zip! down the air shaft! or zip! out in front of that express train! (The scarf can screen well enough against the worst of stains on other articles of clothing, gloves and shoes excepted.)

     Always, the major concern is never with allowing gravity and nature simply to take their necessary and inevitable courses: taking all things into account, the setting down below cannot fail to be of acute interest. No earnest practitioner is eager to attract attention at the moment of the crime's commission, but it's next to impossible to give someone a ride who won't squeal or squall at least part of the way down: and naturally, anyone down below would do well to identify the source of the commentary, so the eager practitioner takes pains to conduct business well after business hours, whether business is being conducted in a city's business district or upon a university's campus with equally adequate drainage structures available. (I'm partial to libraries wherever they stand!)

     I think it is thirty-nine total in fifteen years: might as well finish boasting by acknowledging that I had escorted only five victims before approaching and initiating negotiations with disaffected spouses over insurance claims. I never thought to ask for more than forty percent frankly, I always found it a thrilling day's work, and I was getting paid, too?

     Prospects for the residual, collateral business were obvious from early on, it does not go without saying.

 

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