Harrison

    Kate was a lousy student, and if it weren’t for her looks her grades would have proved it.  Everything she had she got because people thought she was adorable.  Her father paid the extra money for her to go to a private university instead of a state school, perhaps because he knew college is where she would meet her husband, and he wanted to procure higher quality.  She majored in teaching and met her future husband, a marketing major, in the library.  When they married her father paid for the wedding, and when they bought their first house his father footed the bill.  The first year they shopped, and the second year they had their first child, a boy.  They named him Harrison, and the mister worked long hours.  She networked in high power play groups and shopped at Bloomingdales.  He fucked his secretary, and she fucked the handyman.  Harrison stabbed a kid in the arm with a pencil at school.
         One evening, the following week, Harrison’s teacher came to the house to discuss his behavior over dinner.  The missus had ordered Japanese food and eaten 4mg. of Xanex.  Her husband had found the empty blister pack from Pfizer, and a condom wrapper in the master bathroom trash basket. 
         During dinner the teacher, afraid of sushi, picked at a pile of ginger.  This disgusted the man of the house who snapped back a second double scotch.  His wife was engaged by the educator several times with small talk.  She began a verbal tour of the house and then trailed off mid sentence, stuffed a large piece of sashimi into her mouth, and gazed into oblivion. The mister looked at his wife with pure hatred.  Harrison gaped at his teacher who nervously smiled at him. 
         When the missus attempted to excuse herself she stood and fell backwards into the china cabinet and onto the floor.  The teacher began nervously proposing a, “better time”, while the mister finished a third drink and smiled maliciously at her.  She paused, and when she began again he spiked his scotch glass onto the floor beside his wife’s head, who sat looking around stupidly, attempting a polite smile she appeared doped and oddly fanatical.  Harrison stood and smoothly pushed half of a pearl veneered chopstick into his teacher’s ear canal until his fingers pressed against the hot red shell of her ear.  She yanked it out and dropped it without looking at it, and made a claw cage around her bleeding ear with her hand.  She began making hocking sounds and looked around at the family with frenzied panic.  The mister stared as she fumbled toward him.  She clutched his shirt and mouthed something while making the hocking sounds.  He grasped her hand and knelt to pick up the jagged round base of his scotch glass.  He stood up and looked at the teacher with a peculiar concentration.  He ground the broken end into her throat, seizing her hair when she wrenched away, and pushed and turned the broken glass deeper in, shredding tissue and severing her jugular.  She spun around in time to see Harrison thrusting the large chef’s knife into her abdomen, and then yanking it down, ripping her gut open and spilling coils of her intestine onto the kitchen tile.  She fell in a heap, convulsing and making long guttural sounds.  The missus mumbled something incoherent about needing a bath, and began crawling through the absurd clutching pile of organs and entrails beside the table.  She slipped once and a loop of intestine became tangled between her fingers.  Harrison cocked his head like a dog hearing a low whistle.  His dad was laughing a cruel laugh.  The teacher flailed at the hand which had snagged her intestine.  She met the eyes of the hand’s owner and saw a hollow black abyss, she pleaded with eyes that stared blindly down at her like the idiot eyes of a dead animal.