The Collector
By Robin Peace
Response

I call myself the Collector. I keep mementos, reminders of my conquests. I have to have something to remember them by. They brought me so much joy.

For example, my first conquest was a young girl with a broken leg. I saw her limping down the street, dressed in a raincoat, trying to walk with crutches, on a terrible raining day. My heart began to quicken. I wasn’t sure why, but I had this strong impulse to pull my car over to her at once.

“Do you need a ride?” I asked, my voice sounding strange to my own ear.

“Sorry sir, I was told never to talk to strangers,” the little girl said.

“Well my name is Simon. What’s yours?”

“Ami.”

“How old are you?”

“Ten.”

“Well Ami, we are no longer strangers, we’re friends and friends do nice things for each other, right?”

“Yes, I think.”

“Well, I just want to give you a ride home, so you will be safe and dry. Would a bad friend want that?”

“No…,” she said, but I could see she still had some doubts.

I opened my car door and stepped into the rain. I open the passenger side door.

“We could even stop for ice cream. There is a Friendly’s up the street,” I tried, praying that her next answer would be yes as the rain beat upon my bald head, quickly drenching me completely.

Her eyes opened wide and she smiled. “Okay!”

I helped her hobble into the car and I put her crutches in the back seat. As we drove off, I was feeling so much excitement. I almost couldn’t contain myself. I asked her some innocent questions about school and home. I don’t remember her answers because I was thinking of what I was going to do with her.

I stopped at Friendly’s and leaving her in the car, I got her a Jim Dandy Ice Cream Sundae. When I came back with the sundae, she smiled greedily and began to eat it. She was so engrossed; she failed to tell me how to get to her home. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going home anyway.

I took her home and she began to panic.

“Where are we? I thought you were going to take me home!” Ami exclaimed.

“Don’t worry, Ami. I will take you home. But first I had to come home and check on my puppy, Max. Wouldn’t you like to see him?”

Ami furrowed her brows. I could tell she was concerned. But she didn’t try to get away. I helped her into my house, holding her half eaten sundae. She called for Max.

“He’s in his kennel. Have a seat and I’ll go get him.”

Of course there was no puppy. What happened next, you must believe me, I didn’t plan.

I reached out and put my hand around Ami’s throat and squeezed. I watched as her life ended in my hands. She struggled to free herself, but was unsuccessful. Her tiny fingers dug into my hand, causing long scratches. She tried to kick me with her good leg. But I held her far enough away, that she couldn’t reach me. I watched as her eyes closed. Her struggling stopped. I felt the rush and power that I never felt before. I wanted to feel it again.   I waited until midnight to take her lifeless body out and bury her deep in a forest, where my family used to camp at.

I kept her crutches and hung them inside of my wooden shed, above the door. So far I have killed eleven more people who were either on crutches or using canes, which I hung in my shed above my wooden shed, above the door. Their bodies lay in a mass grave in the forest, which I visit once a week, to relive their deaths, until I am prompted to kill again.

I have killed children, adults, and seniors of all different races from different backgrounds. I’ve watched the news and printed articles from the Internet, talking about my missing victims. However, I never felt the same rush from the first kill, and I’ve tried in vain to obtain it.

Tonight I hunt for my 12^th victim.  Maybe I will once again feel that same power over life and death as I did with Ami.   Even if I did, it wouldn’t stop me. I am an addict to the kill. I pray that the authorities will find me.  I’m really not a bad person. I am just un-well.

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Loring Resler
Inspiration Piece

My Forbidden Love
By Robin Peace
Response

I close my eyes.  My mind is alive with white-hot neon light.  I open my eyes and the light explodes out of them, ripping a hole through space and time, just enough to slide my body through.  My name is Stacey, at least in the 21st century, and I am a time jumper.  I am the last of a dying breed in my century, the 31st century.  I am of marrying age but I can’t bring myself to settle down with the men of my century.  They are boring and unexciting.  I want someone who is going to challenge me intellectually.  So, I’ve search through the centuries for a mate.
I think I have found him in the 21st Century.  His name is Anthony and he is as beautiful and perfect as the original Statue of David, before they Christianized it.  I went back in time to see it, awesome!  Anthony’s hair is black and curly and his eyes are steel grey.   His towering athletic 6’4” frame makes me feel like a dwarf at 5’7”.    He picks me up, as if I was a pebble in his hand and kisses me so passionately, I feel swallowed by his soul.  The conversation flows easily and any lulls are filled with holding hands and soft caresses.
As I fall into my century, I find myself in a strange room.  Someone has hijacked my jump.  I immediately realize, I am in the Interrogation Room of the Office of Temporal Oversight and Control.  A semicircle of thirteen judges, on a raise bench, are peering down at me.  My father is sitting in the witness chair, in front of the raised bench.  He is a broken man.  My God, I thought, what have they done to him?
The Judge in the center says, “We know of your desire to mate with the 21st century man, Anthony Kent.  We have blocked it.  At this moment, his memory of you and anyone you both contacted are being scrubbed.  You are to select from a list of appropriate mates and begin the mating process or you will be implanted with a infertility chip until you cooperate.”
I am angry.  I am furious.  I am sad.  I am hurt.  My Anthony has been taken from me without me even able to say good-bye!  I look at my father with rage.  He broke too easy, I thought.  He didn’t even look me in the eye.  He seem to realize my eyes on him, he lowered his head further.  Damn him!  I curse.
I look at the Judge who spoke and say, “Can I go see him one last time?”
“I don’t see what good that would do.  However, first you must undergo the mating process.  Then you may go.” She says.
I nod in acceptance.  I look at the list of ten men on the computer screen and I chose the one that looked the most like Anthony as possible.
This isn’t even going to be as fun as mating with Anthony would have been.  I lay on a sterile table as they take four of our fertilized eggs and inject them in me.  I wait until I am six months along with twins to take the jump back to the 21st Century to see my Anthony.
I watch him as he drew pictures of people in Fell’s Point Square.  His eyes fall on me.  He smiles; it’s brighter than the sun.  He walks over and sits down in front of me and begins to draw.  The chemistry is still there.  But I can’t entertain it.  He sees a man selling a beautiful bouquet of gold and red flowers and he bought the whole bouquet for me.  Tears sprang to my eyes.
He says, “I didn’t buy them for you to cry!  I was hoping for a smile! A beautiful woman about to bring forth life should not look so sad.  What is it that is causing you such sadness?”
I shook my head and stood up.  He had to help me that only made it harder.
I say, “I should have never come back.  The Judge was right; it didn’t do any good.  Thank you for the flowers, I will treasure them always.”
I walk away, not caring if anyone saw me time jump.
Now the flowers are suspended in time, surrounded in glass, so I can enjoy them.  My identical twin daughters look at them in awe, curious about this concept of love.

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Charisse Cecil
Inspiration piece

Schizo
By Robin Peace
Response

“The eyes are the windows to the soul.”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.”

I am sure everyone has heard these quotes and so much more that featured the eyes.  But what happens when you look into someone’s eyes and you can’t trust them because of what you are hearing?  Welcome to my world.  I am Genie and I suffer from schizoaffective disorder.

My day starts normally, if talking to yourself and answering yourself is normal.  I have to talk to myself because my thoughts are running a mile minute in my head.  They need a release.  Talking aloud slows them down and makes them real.  So if I come up with an idea for a story or if I think if a poem, I have time to think and write it down.

Then I go to work, where I wear a headset all day for my sanity.  I hear voices.  I take people’s conversations or sounds (if I am alone) and turn them into conversations about myself in my coworkers’ or boss’ and if I am at home, my neighbors’, voices.  None of what is said is good – like she is going to kill herself, she is listening to our conversations, everyone knows she falls asleep, and stuff like that.  To keep my sanity I stay plugged in because I don’t know when I am hearing them talk about me – really or when it’s all in my imagination and I long lost the patience to try to sort through all the noise to figure it out.  The headset is like me talking aloud.  It calms the beast inside.

But the looks are what I can’t control.  Or rather, the looks I imagine people are giving me.  The headset blocks most of the noise, but not all.  Some still get through and those that do have eyes attached to them.  I can feel them crawling up my spine as I walk by.  They talk about my hair, my clothes, and my weight.  I feel stripped naked and laid bare.  I don’t know what I want to lose more, my hearing or my sight.

Sometimes at work, I think they are testing me to see what I can really hear.  They don’t know about my illness.  I never said I couldn’t hear anything.  I need to be able to hear announcements and the fire alarm.  My problem is I don’t know if the conversations I am hearing are real or my sickness!  I would love to scream that I am schizoaffective aloud and be done with it.  But with the exception of a few friends at work who would empathize with me, the rest would just behave the same way, therefore I wouldn’t gain the response I would hope for by the revelation.

After I leave the place I call hell and others call work, I come straight home for peace and quiet.  I still talk to myself when I get home but it’s a more angry discussion because I can’t leave the stress from work at work.  It also does not help that I think my Latino neighbors are watching me and talking about me.

As I walk to my apartment, I feel their eyes on me and I hear them talking in Spanish.  Then clearly I thought I heard them say,  “There’s the bag lady!”  I drop my head in shame.  But then I realize, if I have a ton of bags – that means – I have a job and I can afford to buy what I what.  I think with pride, call my ass a bag lady because I am not spending my days looking out the window talking about people because I have nothing else to do with my pitiful life.

So now, I walk a little bit with more pride when I walk by Latino neighbors but being Christian I pray for them, and hope they find jobs, because I’ve been there and I know how it is when you aren’t getting a paycheck.

Ah, Christianity.  How I cursed God when I began to hear voices!  My mother thought I was possessed with a demon and I needed to be exorcised.  My father thought I just needed a vacation.  My older sister was secretly bipolar and understood to some extent but she could not openly support me or else she would be under our parents’ microscope.  I was abandoned and alone in all this, because I was too vain to tell my friends how bad off I was.

I also had the worse luck with doctors.  Every time I got on a good medication regime, something would happen, I would change doctors, and then my new doctor would change my prescriptions.  For what reason I never understood why and they also never told me the side affects to these medications.  I was so young and stupid; I trusted that these doctors would not give me anything that would harm me.  For example – why would you give an already obese woman who wants to lose weight a drug known to cause people to gain weight and not check in to make sure she is not experiencing any side effects from the medication?  I gained 100#s in one year, due to being on two medications; not realizing both increased one’s appetite.  True I should have read the medication pamphlet the pharmacist gave you but when I first was diagnosed, I didn’t know my ass from a cardboard box!  I was taking pills praying for the voices to stop and the eyes to stop following me.

But now, the voices and I have an uneasy truce.  I respect the voices and their power and they respect me and my power to shut them up, permanently.  Of course, the voices know I’m too chicken shit and too religious prone to use it and I am afraid of the eyes.  How can I be sure that someone won’t see me and call the police to stop my bid for freedom?

So every night after dinner I sit, half glass of antifreeze in one hand and a half glass of chocolate milk in another.  I figure if I am going to die, I’m going to drink my favorite comfort libation mixed with the poison of the hour.  My suicide note was written a year ago.  I tinker with it every night, making sure it says exactly what I want it to say.  Perhaps tonight will be the night I will make the voices and eyes disappear.

But then, I always have to go tinkle.  I end up looking at myself in the vanity mirror and burst into tears.  I am so vain.  I love myself too much to kill myself.  Does that make sense?  God said love the sinner, hate the sin.  I hate the voices and the eyes but somewhere deep inside, I love me.  Maybe that is why I still manage to get up each morning.  Because this is greater than myself and I just need to close my eyes and trust that the world is big enough to hold sick people like me and sane people like you, passively reading this analysis of me.
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