Taboo Special Issue Preview

Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

Contents Editorial Howard By Richard Farren Barber and Stuart Hughes Apron Strings By SK Harrison Questions Still Unanswered By Adrian Ludens Royal Jelly By Marge Simon One Last Time By Shane Simmons A Psychopath’s Direction By Michael Baker The Tape By Stanley Riiks Four Locks By Adam R. Shannon The Fountain By Joshua De Leon The Witch Finger By Brent Michael Kelley Body Count By Matthew Turbeville Sine Qua Non by Ken Goldman

Cover By Lubi

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

Editorial For most people, the word “taboo” brings to mind such things as forbidden love (for example, interracial marriage and same-sex relationships, which should not be taboo, but unfortunately still are to some people) and certain religious practices (for example, dietary restrictions, clothing dictates, fornication). Some families may even have their own taboos, passed on through generations. While many examples of taboos now seem antiquated and innocent, such as requiring a woman to isolate herself during menstruation, some make a lot of sense. The harming of a child is never okay; yet it happens, sometimes thrilling the perpetrator.

Which is, of course, the main reason taboos are broken.

When Morpheus Tales put out the call for taboo stories for this special issue, I was worried we’d be inundated with weird sex stories. And some of those did come through. But I was pleasantly surprised with the quality and imaginative stories sent in. I had the bittersweet dilemma of having a lot of great stories to choose from, but not being able to accept all of them.

In this issue there are several “familiar” taboos, and a few cleverly imagined ones. The stories will make you cringe, laugh uncomfortably, and perhaps even offend you. But that’s why you’re reading this magazine, right?

So start reading and get what you came for!

Sheri White Editor

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

Howard By Richard Farren Barber and Stuart Hughes “Here?” the waiter asked, and Michael nodded. He draped his coat over the back of the chair. Lesley took the seat beside him. Jenny sat opposite her mother.

The waiter leaned forward to clear away the extra setting. “It’s okay, you can leave those,” Michael said. He checked around the restaurant; it was only half-full and he didn’t recognise any of the other diners. Low Muzak piped in through speakers hidden in the corners of the room and the sound of stainless steel pans clattering on iron burners wafted in from the kitchen.

“Is Howard coming?” Jenny asked.

Beside him, Michael sensed Lesley bristle and he reached out to take her hand.

She pushed him away.

“No,” he said to his daughter. “Not tonight.”

“Are you expecting another guest?” The waiter paused with the additional plate held just above the table.

“It’s fine,” Michael said. “You can leave the plate, but it’s just us three.”

His wife waited until they were alone before speaking. “What have we said about Howard?”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny said. “I forgot.”

“It’s my fault,” Michael said.

Yes, it is. Lesley didn’t have to say anything. They’d been married for 15 years; he already knew what she thought.

“Is he coming?” Jenny whispered.

“No,” her mother said firmly without looking at Michael.

When Howard walked into the restaurant Michael stared down at the menu and tried not to respond. He thought he’d done a good job of hiding his reaction, but he heard Lesley’s breathing change and Jenny turned in her chair.

“He’s here, isn’t he?” She might have been fourteen but there was still a childlike quality to her reactions some times, and with Howard it was something close to wonder.

“No, Michael,” Lesley said under her breath. “Not tonight. Not on our anniversary.”

He wanted to explain: Howard did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

When Howard took the seat opposite him the chair did not move. His friend crossed his hands over the plate.

Michael didn’t look at Howard. It was a betrayal, he understood that, and realised that was exactly how Howard would feel. ### They didn’t talk on the way to the counsellor. Partly because Michael was concentrating on driving through rush-hour traffic, partly because Lesley was in one of her moods and Michael didn’t want to make it any worse, and partly because there was nothing to say that hadn’t been said before.

Lesley was out of her seat belt as soon as Michael drove into the car park, and out of the car as soon as Michael applied the handbrake. By the time Michael had grabbed his coat and locked up, Lesley was a hundred yards ahead. Michael had to run to catch up with her.

Howard joined them as they walked into High Street.

“Hello,” Howard said. Michael nodded. Lesley extended her stride and increased her pace.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

Apron Strings By SK Harrison Whilst nurses were cleaning the goo off Jamie’s body, purple and slick like a worm, I was encouraged to push once more. Out slithered the placenta. A shivering gloopy purple-red organ that looked like a brain or a jellyfish. Vein-rippled and pumped full of what had kept Jamie alive for nine months. Maybe it looked more like a mushroom, that thick white stalk like a stem. My fiancé was handed a pair of large scissors and awkwardly wrangled and then finally cut through the cord.

“Feels like gristle,” he muttered. The lead midwife, with sleek “very-now” ashen hair and ruffled neck skin, slid the umbilical cord and placenta down the bed sheet and into a steel dish. Blood droplets pinged and puddled like rain.

“It’s packed with nutrients,” the midwife told me. She wrapped it up as tenderly as she had my son. “Some mothers like to keep it.”

“Keep it?” My voice was fogged from morphine, most of my attention directed to the delicate slits now cut from my vagina and would forever make my cunt look like a gnarled tree hollow.

“Mmm.” The midwife gently tapped the bagged placenta, like a waiting takeaway. I could smell the warm copper smell from it. Condensation beaded the outside of the bag. “Very good for you. We have cool boxes in the stockroom if you wanted to think about it.”

“Uh-huh.” I wanted to hold my son. A junior midwife, still young enough for silver train tracks to grip her teeth, slid my son to my breast. He made snuffling noises, his eyes shut, and he flicked his head when I ran a finger down his cheek that felt as soft as the inside of a rose petal. His hair was dark and cowlicky, still damp from inside of me. I teased small curls and gently stroked a fingernail the size of a pinhead.

The lead midwife leaned in and played with Jamie’s toes. “I still have my son’s placenta, you know. In the freezer. He’s twenty-two now, but it was a way to feel connected to him. Our first and last very real connection.”

“You must have had him young,” my fiancé said.

“Oh, you.” The midwife smiled, but at my baby. She tapped Jamie’s nose and then sniffed deeply of his fresh baby head scent. She exhaled, her pupils dilated. “I’ll always have that.” ### Freeze-dried into capsules to swallow as easily as shop-bought vitamin C. Or blended with berries and bananas into a breakfast smoothie.

Fried with garlic and chilies and served with salad like a thin steak.

Or raw chunks tamped down by the gum line like chewing tobacco.

There were many options to suit everyone’s palette.

Antioxidants flooded the immune system, made breast milk flow as fresh and creamy as Gold Top, and halted post-partum depression. Energy levels like those unknown since your early twenties when your body was hard and tight and could work and party for hours without rest, that feeling returned. Faces ache from laughing due to sheer joy of life. Staving off those baby black and blues.

When Jamie had been home a fortnight friends would crash the house daily to see him, our brand-new toy. They marvelled at the perfect cuteness of him. Those eyelashes like paintbrush flicks. Little hands that gripped a whole finger with a surprising strength. The sheer softness of the down on his face.

“Oh, would you look at him?” They cooed over Jamie’s head. “He’s just so delicious!”

My fiancé and I grin at each other.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

Questions Still Unanswered By Adrian Ludens Jerry Hodge looked forward to spending time with his kids after he got off work.

He hoped they’d finally open up to him.

Just three months ago, his wife, Caron, had driven her minivan off a bridge.

Garrett and Gabby had been in the vehicle with her. Jerry swallowed back tears as he sat at his desk, remembering. Though he had lost Caron, he would have the entire weekend with Garrett and Gabby. They had never spent much time together before the accident. They’d never been close. The children were Caron’s from a previous marriage, but Jerry found he had so many questions for them now.

Jerry pencil-whipped a few reports, and put the finishing touches on some ad copy. He called the house but no one answered. He responded to e-mails and sent a few of his own. The clock on the wall seemed to run more sluggishly the closer the hands got to six o’clock.

Finally, five minute’s shy of quitting time, Jerry decided to call it a day. He logged off his laptop and activated the voice mail on his office phone. The faces of Garrett and Gabby stared up at him from their framed photo on his desk. While most of his coworkers posted family photos on social network sites or kept them on their cell phones, Jerry remained old school. He reached out and picked up the framed photograph.

He barely recognized their youthful features. How time had changed them! Jerry sighed with resignation and returned the photo to its proper place.

On his way down the hall, he ran into Sara who slowed and smiled. “Done for the day?”

“Yep. You staying late?” Jerry didn’t wish to be impolite, but he wanted to be on his way. What if the kids weren’t there when he got home? It was an irrational fear, he knew, but it plagued him often.

“No. I’m leaving in a few minutes.”

Jerry noticed Sara glancing at his left hand. He crossed his arms in an effort to hide his still-present wedding band.

“Gonna take some time and visit with the kids,” Jerry revealed.

At first Sara looked at him blankly, but then realization must have struck, because she regarded him with barely concealed sympathy. Tears welled and threatened to break rank down her cheeks.

“Oh, I see,” she said, though to Jerry it was obvious that she didn’t. She couldn’t understand how it was for him now. No one could. The urge to push past her rose, but Jerry maintained his self-control. He flashed what he hoped Sara would take as a reassuring smile. “I better scoot. Enjoy your weekend.”

“You too, Jerry.” She gave him a sad smile. He could feel her eyes upon him as he hurried down the hall. Jerry wondered how long before she asked him to coffee—or dinner. He wondered how he’d respond if she did.

Closed doors and dark offices loomed and receded as he drew closer to the elevators. Jerry guessed most of his coworkers had already left for the weekend. During these summer months, he knew the temptation to sneak out a few minutes early grew stronger for everyone.

“Jerry! On your way home?” The phlegm-coated gravel voice of Mr. Everson was unmistakable. The man had started the ad agency in the late 1960s and his employees had come to the general consensus that he would someday die at his desk.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

One Last Time By Shane Simmons Mrs. Black was quite mad by the time they found her, eight days after her husband had died in the throes of passion.

On a Saturday night, after a dozen beers at the bar on Fifth Street, Mr. Black, a three-hundred-and-fourteen-pound construction worker, returned home to his waiting wife of eighteen years. She was a frail woman, approaching fifty years and ninety pounds. They were an odd match—Mrs. Black a small introverted book-reader, Mr. Black a large gregarious fellow. They did, however, love each other enough to stick together for nearly two decades, despite regular financial problems and occasional arguments generated by Mrs. Black's reticence and Mr. Black's weekend drinking binges.

On this particular Saturday night, as with most others, when Mr. Black came home inebriated, scratching at the front door with his key as he searched for the lock, Mrs. Black sat in the living room reading a romance novel. She listened for a full minute until her husband found the keyhole and let himself in. She greeted him from her seat, and watched as he walked unsteadily into the kitchen to find a bag of potato chips to eat. By the time he came back, Mrs. Black had carefully placed a tasselled bookmark between pages 124 and 125, and laid her book down on a table next to the couch. She sat, her hands folded in her lap, looking straight-faced up at her husband, waiting for the grin she knew was coming.

When Mr. Black did finally grin, it was an honest, albeit lecherous one, directed at his wife between potato chip-salted lips. At this signal, she stood, fastidiously straightened her skirt, and walked ahead of him up the stairs. He followed, leaning on the steps with one hand as he turned the initial corner at the base of the staircase. With his free hand, he reached out and pinched his wife's behind slightly more roughly than he might have had he been sober. Mr. Black rarely touched his wife when sober though, and certainly never sexually. For the last five years of their life together, Mr. and Mrs. Black had only engaged in sexual intercourse on Saturday nights, after Mr. Black had gotten at least five beers into himself. They would skip the occasional week, but generally he was punctual.

Once in their bedroom, Mrs. Black stripped quietly, passionlessly, somewhat bored. She didn't resent her weekly chores under the covers because she loved her husband. Somewhere along the way though, sex had lost any mystique or excitement it ever held for her. Such sexual thrills lived on for her only in the pulp novels she read which were, she acknowledged, a fantasy far removed from her own life.

She lay naked under the single sheet of the bed. By this time her husband had managed to undo his belt buckle and drop his pants to his ankles. Leaving his stained t-shirt on, he mounted his wife, penetrated her, and buried his face in her shoulder, groaning. Mrs. Black was dry, but her husband pumped at her anyway, like a slow laborious machine. She stared silently at the ceiling and thought, as she had last Saturday and the Saturday before that, that she should get Mr. Black to paint over the cracks up there before the summer ended. She tried not to think about her husband, rolling his fat belly over her body rhythmically, fantasizing about the centrefolds of his youth so he could keep enough of an erection for the time he needed to come.

Two minutes later Mr. Black groaned slightly louder than he had upon penetration, convulsed briefly, and went limp atop his wife.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

A Psychopath’s Direction By Michael Baker My name is Paul Felkin, and I’m a serial killer. I make films, you see. This was one of my favourites.

What an afternoon of doing fuck all. I had lost my job a few days ago you see, and I had to spend the day over at my parents’. I had an apartment of my own now due to the beautiful thing of flying the nest, but my younger brother Adam did not seem to want that luxury. He’s a good kid. I bid goodbye to my mother and walked the short road to my boy Greg’s house. It’s a pretty nice place, big and spacious for himself and his family. Adorable family. His wife Marie is a knockout, I had to admit. The sun was shining brightly, which made a first; we had shit weather all week until now. It’s nice to have some sunlight in the day, especially since we barely get any sunlight at all, what with it being part of the fucking UK. I didn’t need to knock; we had a long-standing arrangement of me just randomly waltzing into the place as though I owned it. Marie often joked on how I was her “second husband” since I was here that often. Fuck…what I wouldn’t have given to have those firm legs wrapped around me. But that would never happen. That, and I’m loyal to my friends. I love Greg, and would do anything to protect him and his family.

“Hey man, it’s been a while.” Greg smiled broadly when he saw me. I loved his smile. We had been best friends now for twenty years. I can’t believe how long it’s been. As we did our usual brother-hug and bumped fists, I got a great view of his wife Marie, dressed in her pink cocktail dress, which gave me an amazing view of her cleavage.

“You guys don’t get into much trouble; I’m heading out with the girls,” Marie teased, as she sauntered past me to give her husband a loving kiss. If there was anyone who deserved happiness, it was those two, for definite. They met you see, at a tennis match at Wimbledon, some fifteen years ago. That sounds like so long ago if you think about it now.

“Where’s Amber?” I asked them, as Greg wrapped his arms around his lovely wife. Amber is their daughter, beautiful little thing. I’m sure she has already broken some hearts already, and will for years to come.

“Oh, she’s round at a friend’s house. It’s great to see her doing so well.” Marie let out a gentle sigh before pecking Greg on the lips again and leaving. “Love you, honey!” She sang out.

“Love ya, too,” Greg replied, smirking. Lucky prick. He turned to face me.

“Good to see you, man, it’s been a while.” He handed me a can of Woodpecker cider which I happily accepted, and we went downstairs to his basement, where he had all his gear. “I’m sorry to hear you lost your job, mate.”

I had to shrug. My boss was a complete asshole to be honest. I would have shoved a knife through his heart when he told me they were “letting me go,” but doing so would have brought some shitty consequences. Greg revved up his computer and we went onto our website. Our fucking masterpiece. Greg is a legend on the computer, better than I am, even better than my kid brother. He works in some computing company where they build gaming systems, and he has a shit-ton of money to do this kind of thing. We got onto the website, which we had been controlling for twelve years now. In truth I’m shocked it hasn’t been seized yet, but Greg just loved keeping them on their toes.

“Here, pal, this is what I wanted to show you.” Greg showed me his email, filled with requests. A couple were just recommendations from some other idiots about other snuff sites.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

Four Locks By Adam R. Shannon Bill Bolan played as pretty a banjo as anyone along the canal, his fingers summoning up staccato hymns like a pool of frogs piping in praise of springtime, until Uriah Healey blew off his hand.

It happened just upstream of Four Locks, the cluster of scavenged shacks and lock-keepers houses where the boatmen drew their mail and traded gossip. Bill's banjo was freshly tuned, as yet unmarred by the creeping damp that would inevitably consume the taut certainty of the strings. He had just visited a widow in a peeling house above Cumberland, who tuned the instrument by ear while Bill's boat was being refilled with coal.

Returning from her house, Bill could look out over the ramshackle warehouses that lined the quay, walls and rooflines meeting at odd angles, no two alike. The air was cold and clean, the houses set back behind tended yards and blinding white fences.

In Cumberland, his banjo was restored to grace. He saw the hills above the canal as a sacred place, where the true musical notes were preserved against spoilage, and where men like himself might venture, but never linger. Above the widow's house rose the coal barons' estates, set far back from wrought iron fences lining wide hilltop roads, full of creatures that to him were as beautiful and haughty as angels. Beyond that, the ridge lines rose in ascending formation, stretching into the smouldering blue sky of Appalachia.

"There are things up in those hills that man was never meant to meet," his father used to say, warning Bill never to stray from the fertile lowlands around the Potomac River. "Pitiless things that will devour the good for the sins of the wicked, and leave little to bury."

Uriah Healey, who ended Bill's banjo-playing days, would have laughed at those superstitions. He had a stone house up on South Mountain, where he kept his wife away from the eyes of other men. Even as he concluded his failed business attempts around Four Locks, he was looking forward to retreating into the high country for winter. But before that, he had to teach a man a lesson about laughing in the face of a serious business proposal.

Healey had approached Bill on his last trip upstream through the locks, wanting to buy a share in his longboat. Bill threw him off the deck with scarcely a grunt. Healey was little more than a charlatan, chased upstream by IOUs and unsettled accounts, but the one thing he couldn't tolerate was to be treated like what he was.

Bill had moored his longboat at the towpath's edge for the night, setting out on the foredeck with a hurricane lantern, his pipe, and his banjo, fiddling a bit with each in turn, in the satisfied way of men who imbue every movement with quiet meaning.

His boat lay low in the water, pregnant with coal still warm from the earth, like meat fresh from the butcher, and wet with the sweat of the men who had hauled it out of the stifling darkness. Healey slunk up the towpath like a fox, jumped the gap from the canal wall, brought up his rifle and took off Bill's left hand in a red thunderclap. ### Uriah Healey didn't try to leave Four Locks right away. The closest lawman was fifty miles downstream, and Healey knew rules and laws were fluid along the canal and among those who plied it, moving and changing direction constantly, like the boats themselves. Everyone in the village talked of doing something, but no one did anything.

Healey had planned to return to his house on South Mountain, where his wife awaited him with their two children. She was said to be a vision, a woman who sang so sweetly that men forgot the pain of living.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

The Witch Finger By Brent Michael Kelley The screams seem far away and small. The severed finger has my full attention.

If she’s a witch – a real witch – her finger will turn to wood after it’s been cut it off. I suppose I should explain how I know.

I was way out in the woods behind my house taking sunset photos up on the ridge. I was getting some great shots. Stuff I knew I could sell to a certain outdoor catalogue who’d bought enough of my images in the last few years that I could keep the lights on. What the catalogue didn’t buy I’d upload to a stock image site.

Photography wasn’t the only reason for the hike, though. I’d snapped at Lisa, and I needed some space to cool off. I’d called her boring, and for a creature like her that’s worse than if I called her the C-word.

The sky burned red in the west, streaked through with clouds of lavender and blonde. I lined up a pair of slate boulders in the foreground with the treeline and sunset behind, and my camera snapped away. I was about to switch lenses when I heard the scream. I froze, listened, heard it again. It sounded like a child in agony, so I cased my camera and sprinted in the direction it came from. Branches yanked at my flannel and whipped at my face, but I didn’t slow.

I knew I’d gotten close, but there was no way to pinpoint the scream’s owner. I stopped and listened again. A sound – a snarling choke of futile effort – maybe forty feet to my ten o’clock. I bolted through the brush and the brambles as the cry came again. It sounded inhuman, like some kind of goblin being tortured, but I pushed on.

I arrived at a clearing, and there it was. Nailed upside-down by one hind leg to a half-dead oak tree… a rabbit. It struggled and screamed its awful scream, causing blood to trickle through its brown fur. It froze as it saw me, then it thrashed even harder.

My heart sank. “Who did this to you?”

I admit I got a little choked up seeing the poor creature’s terror. There was only one way to help. I unfolded my pocket knife and offered a calming hand. As I reached toward it, the rabbit bucked again and cried out. The poor thing was breathing so frantically.

The first stab was sloppy and off target. The second and third and fourth got the rabbit in the middle of the neck. Blood squirted on my face as the rabbit flopped against the tree. When I was sure it was dead, I stared at the knife in my hand. Fur and blood stuck to the blade, my hands, my shirt.

No creature deserved such a fucked up end. Whoever did this…

I heard motion to my right, and I spun toward it with the knife out. A shadowy figure crouched in the brush. Or did it? I watched it until I was sure I saw breathing.

“Are you the sick fuck who nailed that rabbit up there?” I pointed my blade at the shadow.

There came a clicking sound then. When I realized it was a dry-throated laugh, my skin crawled. As I recoiled, my boot met a rock. I landed hard on my ass, and the knife tumbled out of reach. My camera case had fallen open, and my left hand clutched at the camera to keep it from falling out.

More clicking laughter came as an old woman shuffled out of the brush. She wore a coat of dried grass and animal pelts with random cattails jutting here and there.

The red of the sunset flashed in her eyes like a cat’s eyes catching moonlight.

The woman tilted her head at the dead rabbit, then back at me. “Not nice to kill my bunny.” She shuffle-hopped a few steps closer to me.

“I put it out of its misery. What kind of sick fuck would nail it up like that?” I rummaged in the weeds for my knife, never looking away from her.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

Body Count By Matthew Turbeville The death should have seemed random enough. Mr. Jerald’s car found with his body inside, jutting out of the lake like a small splinter in a grey thumb. He had too much to drink, the police said, and had driven his car right off the bridge and into the water. What a terrible way to die.

I remembered Mr. Jerald in class, laughing at me when I couldn’t strike the right note on the cello. Mr. Jerald, calling me “gay” and “sissy” behind my back to the other students. Sometimes, the other students giggled. I tried to get in on the entertainment.

I wanted to be a part of the grand joke, like a jester. Sometimes I would break into the joke first, suggesting that I was the one behind it all: me being fat, gay, a little crazy.

People usually laughed more awkwardly at me than they did at Mr. Jerald’s jokes.

I don’t know if he had become a good man, or if he tried to be one. He may have changed for all I know, struck by God or Oprah or some other powerful force that made him do right by his life.

Mr. Jerald, sitting drunk in his car as it filled with icy water. Mr. Jerald had made my life hell for years. A part of me felt dead with him, but I couldn’t explain that to anyone.

“Aren’t you glad he’s dead?” they asked. “Aren’t you glad to finally be moving on with your life?”

Answering this question was like being stuck on an impossible round of Final Jeopardy. The whole audience thinks they know the answer, but you’re chewing your lip and waiting for an idea to come to you.

A part of me wanted to feel guilty for his car being in that lake. Perhaps, if he hadn’t been awful to me, he might have died in his sleep in a warm bed.

I want to assure you, it was not guilt that kept me awake at night. It was something darker, creeping at the edges, a lighter igniting the corner of a photograph. ### It took a while before it occurred to me I was killing off the people who’d hurt me. I thought maybe karma was at play, but after a while, it began to sink in that maybe I had arranged for this somehow. Had I made a promise to Satan years ago and just forgotten? Had I sold my soul to the devil, just to get revenge on anyone who had ever hurt me? My memory was bad enough — it was likely I’d forgotten the curse like I had the elements of the periodic table.

I was a twenty-three-year-old boy just about to graduate from college. I was not a boy with powers. I did not believe in powers, or superstition, or magic, or fate. I did not believe that anything was supposed to happen, yet these things were happening all around me. People were dying left and right: by their own hands, by the hands of others, by accident, taken by illness.

Intervening didn’t seem like an option, as I hadn’t taken a tally over the years of every person who had hurt me. I had been hurt irrevocably by innumerable people, it seemed, as it felt I was built to be hurt again and again.

But I did know who’d hurt me the most. The large, throbbing pain in my heart, my chest, my stomach, my throat. I knew who made me cry when I did cry—which was rarer and rarer these days.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

Sine Qua Non by Ken Goldman .ne qua non (sini kwa non´ ) Latin.

Something essential; an indispensable condition; an absolute prerequisite (lit., without which not) -Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language

On Tuesday at Le Bon Fin, after completing an excellent steak dinner soaked in a red mushroom sauce accompanied by a fine Bordeaux, I pushed myself contentedly from my table. Having made certain to leave an especially handsome tip for Christophe, I decided that tonight was as good a time as any to put a bullet into my head.

My affairs were in order, my debts paid, and proper good-byes expressed.

Earlier I had mailed a generous check to Madeline, my elder sister, a stipend sufficient to see her through her recent divorce from that weasel with whom she had wasted half her life. I had provided Bartholomew, my faithful and loving basset, enough of his favourite gravy-soaked chow to last him well into the weekend. A small .22 revolver inside my sports coat pocket supplied the most expeditious means for my demise. Once I had solidly resolved this agenda, the evening’s anticipated denouement interfered not a whit with my appetite.

“An exceptional meal, as always, my friend,” I informed Samuel, maitre d´ of Le Bon Fin for as long as I have been a patron. Fastening my waistcoat to the top buttonhole in preparation for the cold walk back to my apartment, I set out for the street, firm in my resolution that this hour must be my last.

I will not weary you with long-winded details regarding my justification for what might otherwise seem such an audacious and ignoble act. Suffice to say that I have accomplished whatever pedestrian goals I had set out to accomplish in this life, and that the tedious pursuit of more of them seemed at best futile and at worst tiresome.

Madeline would provide a good home for Bartholomew, and in turn he would furnish the companionship my sister would require in my absence, particularly since Henry, that bastard, had packed his bags and absconded to God-knows-where. Because I hoped to minimize the discomfort of those most precious to me, the correct timing of my death assumed paramount importance.

The night felt colder than the forecast had indicated, and there seemed a threat of more snow. Erratic weather conditions are bothersome to people manoeuvring this city’s streets past dark, and I preferred my death not create further nuisance to perfect strangers nor officers of the law. Feeling it best to commit the act at home, I resolved to make my death both quick and minimally sloven. The revolver’s muzzle placed firmly inside my mouth would do the trick.

Of course, I worried myself concerning Bartholomew’s reaction. He has always been a skittish creature, and perhaps it might have been preferable to take him first to Madeline. However, I knew doing so would arouse my sister’s immediate suspicions.

She would quickly realize that I had never once spent a night apart from my beloved basset, and questions would inevitably follow. Still, I could not erase the image of my canine companion yowling into the wee hours when I did not answer him, awakening neighbours who would arrive to find me ingloriously slumped in an expanding pool of my own blood.

An undignified death, and messy. Worse than that, bothersome and inconsiderate of my neighbours, ill-mannered behaviours utterly unworthy of me.

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Morpheus Tales: The Taboo Special Issue

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