A thunderous ringing noise roused the somnolent house on Maple Street, number 92, lulled in soporific breeze of the autumn night. A corpulent, pale yellow fingered hand picked up the receiver of an obsolescent, antiquated phone, the noise of which perforated the bucolically alveolated inside of the house. “Yes?” A raucous and slightly hoarse voice breathed languidly. “Detective Davidson? It’s lieutenant Kowalsky… I apologize for calling this early, but we need you over at the high school… there’s been a murder,” the voice was cacophonous and discombobulated. “I’ll be right there,” Maximilian Davidson answered instantaneously, as the telephone receiver dropped like hot coal from his hand. The cigarette from his other hand relinquished life in an unpretentious, cantaloupe-colored ashtray, poised on a small, oak tree coffee table, next to the leather sofa. His body dissipated in the Cimmerian shade of the second floor, leaving a potent odor of tobacco behind him.
The procedure of getting dressed had never been an elongated endeavor with Max, whose current reconnaissance of his mirror double only produced a ridiculously scrutinizing portrayal of a man whose trousers were painstakingly ill-fitted, due to their brevity. He raised his bushy eyebrow in disapproval, but then changed his mind. This was no time for such inessentials. Still in precipitance, his bearish, tawny fingers knocked on the door to the adjacent room. “Rod, are you sleeping?” Not wishing to discompose the sleeper, he went downstairs and scribbled a note as to his whereabouts, leaving it on the kitchen table, grabbing his car keys in one lightning bolt strike and skulked out of his grave-like abode.
The pacified morning seemed to promise a wondrous day. Thin strips of sunshine were piercing the cerulean skies, it was still and placatory. The leaves around the school were lying laggardly on the ground, only mollifyingly trembling at the wind, titillating them softly. Suddenly, they bristled under the elephantine boots and rustled in the rhythm of the words that followed. “Detective Davidson, over here!” The image of the idyllic morning dissolved in a dreamy miasma in Max’s mind. Instead of the serenity of daybreak, before him lay prostrate a shapely mass of flesh and bones, whose recumbent chest stood apoplectically, but a little while ago, oozed the liquid of life, until finally its crimson verve disappeared. Artificially posed as a sleeping infant, the eyes of the body, named Rosemary Gordon, were mere vacuous shells of an enrapturing being once in existence. Images of Rosemary, magniloquent and mirtful, carrying books infused with the fragrance of knowledge and the distant past, passing through his house a multitudinous of times in the preceding years, to be tutored by his agoraphobia suffering twin brother. Her pearly hair, now a slovenly mess of muddy twigs and sodden leaves, encircled her milky face, with elfin, clarion curls making embryonic universes of their own, bereft of life, just like she was.
“So what’s the story?” Max was playing with his keys in his pockets, twisting them, turning, feeling the edges. “The janitor came here early in the morning to clear the leaves, saw her here and called us immediately. He says he didn’t touch anything,” one of the police officers replied dryly. “Are you saying he didn’t even check her pulse?” Max’s question beseeched bombshell of shock, repudiation, of any feeling connoting a human response, but it still lacked in this sense. He was insufflating the essence of the crime scene, which smelled not of death, but of life and jubilance; as if nature itself rejoiced in taking into herself such aureate child of the universe. Max’s eyes peregrinated through the labyrinth of Rosemary’s hibernating body. “That’s what he claims.” “Alright, take his statement and call Richardson, I want him on this.” Max bowed down, as if to give respect to a royal descendant, and his subaqueous, blue eyes rested on the girl’s right hand. Its claw-like position secreted her elongated, lavender nails, clenching a barely salient black piece of fabric, like an allegiant vestige of life. “Get this from under her nails and send it to the guys at the lab,” Max addressed one of the police officers around him who were securing the area.
Then, a mirage in the ruby colored fountain of youth beneath the body, unveiled a footprint, smudged precipitately in an attempt to disfigure it. Still, due to the killer’s negligence and exigency to vacate the crime scene, minuscule traces of the beginning and the end of the foot were perceptible. Max carefully measured the foot length. He was cognizant of the fact that according to scientific calculations, it had been proven that the length of a person’s foot is approximately fifteen percent of the person’s height. After some light-weight calculations, Max ascertained that the height was 6.3 feet. His pen made noiseless ink scratches on the paper of his attenuated, navy-blue notebook.
Several cigarette butts were lying unpremeditatedly thrown in close proximity of the body, emphasizing the iniquitous and infinitely doleful way in which this earthly body was purloined of its life. The smell of tobacco now seemed to puncture the nostrils of police officers, who continued to shake their heads in incredulity of the mortiferous fate of Rosemary Gordon. A bit further away, sequestered in the Lilliputian wasteland of leaves and twigs, a salmon-colored cell phone lay, almost as if it was thrown there, in an effort to put it out of sight. Max’s hands slid into achromatic, surgical gloves, and his fingers sensed the nest-like sanctuary of the powdery substance spread on the inside. The chalky letters on the black screen screamed: “M2XD2S6N.” Max’s pen lacerated the paper yet again, with susurration of secrets that were yet to be divulged, after which the phone slid into a plastic bag. His mind swarmed in attempt to decipher the cryptic lettering, but the message, just like the cold lips, refused to reveal itself. “Alright, let her family know… then tell them we need to talk to them. The friends, too,” he said out loud. “What a Monday,” he continued silently.
The day seemed to distend itself into infinity, until finally Max closed the door to his house from the inside. Remnants of information about Rosemary pierced his mind and his thoughts seemed to devour one another. According to everyone, Rosemary was a straight A student, she didn’t drink, she didn’t do drugs, she didn’t have a boyfriend, which astonished Max, because he thought such a beautiful girl must had had numerous suitors. Yet, she was more concentrated on her future, eagerly sending out applications to universities. All in all, Max couldn’t have imagined a more promising young woman. Not even his brother could tell him anything he hadn’t already heard, though he was her tutor for years, perfecting her young enthusiastic mind: “Oh, Rosemary? The darling creature, I just saw her two days ago and am expecting her tomorrow… What? What are you saying, Max? Dead? Murdered!? Rosemary? I… I don’t believe it… it’s impossible… are you certain it’s her? I.. yes… I know… but, she was glorious, Max, simply magnificent, I never had such a student before and I will never have one like that again… an angel, Max, an angel! She burnished the house with her appearance and her mind was able to bend the permafrost rut of time this house is in… Oh, Rosemary…”
The gargantuan, ligneous door to the hebetudinous house on Maple Street 92, occluded with a highly auricular reverberation. Max’s desideratum was that the indwelling state of his mind be amalgamated with his house: mute and perpetual in its travail not to be enticed by the extramural existence of the world. But, that was not the case. He schlepped his feral feet over the screetching staircase, to the second floor, leaning on the handrail. His body was impelling itself through the irriguous air, insufflating heavily. Max infiltrated his room and poised himself in front of the seeing glass. “It’s been a long day, Rod… and I don’t know how much of this I can take,” he inurned his face in the metacarpi of his hands. The semblance double looked at the quailing figure. “Max… I… I have something to tell you…” The head looked up askance at the expatiating mirage in the mirror. “About the case?” “Yes…”
Instantaneously, Max’s mind beamed with a simulacrum of the previous night. Ectypes of that fateful night swayed like little paper boats in the rivulet of his thoughts. Rosemary came to the house. She spent two hours here. Nothing auspicated the tragedy to ensue. She was elated… ecstatic because she had been accepted to a prestigious university and would be going anon. Her exuberance, it was engulfing, poignant, acerbating, otiose. Because, why would she want to go? Her place was here… here! There was no reason for her to go. Why? These words perturbed her. Her mannerism was one of qualm and apprehension, a look never seen before. She wanted to relinquish herself of my presence, to obliterate me from her mind… so quickly. Without an affectionate word, without… me. I pleaded with her not to go. Her mercurial lips turned to stone, her eyes thundered odium and repugnance at my proposal. Repugnance! At love! I loved her… and she wanted to leave me. I just wanted to embrace her, just touch her… but she said no… no embracing… I felt… it felt caustic. She ran out of the house, her hair flittering behind her, like a golden message of enmity. I rushed after her. She sought shelter at the school... She hid, I sought. I begged, kneeled in front of her… she was algid… I saw a big branch on the ground… she didn’t even realize I went outside for her, for the first time in fifteen years, she didn’t notice, she was just… flabbergasted and plagued by my presence, so we went behind the school… and the branch… I took it, it was dark, too dark to see what I had done… but it was too late… her stomach was so soft that the branch kept sliding in over and over again… I don’t know when it desisted, when I desisted.
Max’s eyes ached to shatter the mirror into a million glossy lies, to castigate the glass, to hemorrhage the truth out of his own body and mind. His body dropped to the floor and stopped breathing. He wanted… he needed to stop being alive, like Rosemary was. Yet, his carnivorous body ingurgittated a huge bubble of air and composed its oscillating self. “We’ll deal with this, Max… we will overcome, I promise you.”
An acute sound lacerated the quietude of the house. The telephone was caterwauling, ululating, coveting. The depleted body dragged itself back down and the spiritless hand picked up the receiver. The voice merely breathed into the little black holes imbibing the breath. “Max? Max… we caught the guy… it’s the janitor… he’s got a criminal record… the foot size fits, and he’s a heavy smoker… it took some time, but he confessed… Max? Max, are you there? Max? …”
The receiver was hanging on an elongated malleable cord, swaying in the air. The voice was dissolving into the voiceless matrix of the living room, staying indefatigably quiescent. The iron-curtain was cadaverous. The crepuscule overpowering. A mind irreversibly fragmented.
