Flash Fiction by Ron Riekki
“So?”
“So?”
“What’re your thoughts?”
“Well, nothing makes sense.”
“It all makes sense.”
“I beg to differ.”
“It’s love.”
“You’re looking at a guy chopped up into pieces and you think of love?”
“He’s not chopped into pieces. He’s in one piece.”
“That’s a finger over there.”
“OK, two pieces.”
“This is the opposite of love.”
“Well, I’m with you there. This is death.”
“Which doesn’t make sense.”
“We’re not monks. Don’t have to make sense to us. What has to make sense is who did it.”
“You think it’s his wife?”
“Maybe.”
“Mistress?”
“Maybe.”
“Why not just a random murder?”
“Valentine’s Day. There’s no random murders on Valentine’s Day.”
“You know what day of the year has the most murders?”
“It’s every day of the year. This is Detroit.”
“But what day in the U.S. has the most murders?”
“Let’s keep focused on this one. Not the entire goddamn United States right now.”
“You got fingerprints yet?”
“The EMTs came in here and got their fingerprints on everything. One of ‘em even started CPR.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Blood started gushing out even more when he did that.”
“Idiot.”
“He was trying to save his life.”
“Idiot.”
“This guy was dead anyway.”
“Idiots. All of ‘em.”
“All of who?”
“The whole world.”
“Nah, people are smart. Whoever it was came in the back door, had a knife, used it, and left. Nice and simple.”
“Any of this on camera?”
“No. She knew.”
“You think it’s a she?”
“I told you. It’s Valentine’s Day.”
“What if he’s gay?”
“Good point. Except look how the knife went in.”
“OK.”
“Men stab up. Women stab down. You ever see Psycho?”
“Yeah.”
“The shower. Standard horror stabbing. That’s how women stab. Men tend to hold it like this, and they jab upwards. This was a woman.”
“You can tell by how they stabbed?”
“Ninety percent of the time.”
“But that was Anthony Perkins doing the stabbing in Psycho.”
“Yeah, but he was his mother when he was doing the stabbing. He wasn’t Norman Bates. He was Mrs. Bates.”
“You like horror movies?”
“Horror movies are nothing. Real life makes Saw look like a cartoon.”
“They didn’t steal anything?”
“Nothing.”
“What you think this guy did?”
“Well, women tend to stab a few times and then they’re done. Maybe one or twice. Guys’ll stab over and over and over again. Women like to jab once, leave the knife in ‘em. Except there’s no knife.”
“She was pissed.”
“Well, you gotta be pretty angry to commit murder. And she was furious. Probably stabbed this guy thirty, forty times.”
“Fifty.”
“Yup.”
“On Valentine’s Day.”
“Exactly.”
“That a hair in the blood?”
“Yup. You see it too?”
“That’s a long hair.”
“And this guy’s pretty damn bald.”
“You think it’s too easy nowadays?”
“What?”
“Forensics. Back in Sherlock Holmes days you had to be a genius. Nowadays, with DNA testing, it’s so basic.”
“Hairs get everywhere.”
“I bet our hair is in this room already.”
“Guaranteed.”
“You know the balls of lint in your home.”
“I know.”
“It’s basically us. Those balls of crap in the corner on the linoleum, it’s just a small collection of your body parts.”
“Well, not body parts—”
“But hair, dead skin cells, just, well, body parts.”
“Sort of.”
“We’re gross.”
“It’s just cells. Mitochondria. Break us down into atoms and we’re not gross.”
“I don’t know. I saw a guy who took a chainsaw to his couch one time. I walked in, the couch looked dead. It looked kinda sickening, like it was the intestines of the couch. I’m like that with car wrecks too. A car flipped upside-down, leaking gas, it feels like blood to me. All those pipes showing, it looks like evisceration, like the car’s colon is sticking out. So if cars and couches freak me out, human bodies are a lot worse.”
“You better get used to it, rookie.”
“It’s my second year.”
“My second decade.”
“But it is pretty beautiful that a butcher gets stabbed in his own butcher’s shop.”
“It’s his Dad’s butcher shop.”
“How you know that?”
“I come here.”
“You come here?”
“Sometimes. It’s a small city.”
“Detroit’s a small city?”
“It’s a village. New York’s a city. Detroit’s a town.”
“Well, it’s a town with a thousand homicides in the last few years.”
“And this is our one hundredth this year.”
“Is it really?”
“Yeah, I been watching the board.”
“Damn.”
“And this case is closed.”
“I’ll put everything on that hair.”
“Exactly.”
“Solved in seconds.”
“Well, we got some testing to do. We’ll see. So what day has the most murders?”
“This is funny. Well, not funny, but Christmas is the day with the most suicides. But the most homicides is Fourth of July.”
“Nothing more American than homicide.”
“And nothing more Christian than suicide.”
“Tell that to Jesus.”
“It’s a sad world.”
“It’s actually kind of beautiful.”
“It is?”
“We just walked in here, like you said, in seconds, we figured this one out.”
“Minutes.”
“Whichever. But it’s good. We need more of this.”
“More murders?”
“No, more cops who care.”
“Do you care?”
“No.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Who am I going to care about?”
“Your kids. Your wife.”
“Got none. Divorced. The real empty nest. Extremely divorced.”
“So what about yourself?”
“What about myself?”
“Do you care about yourself?”
“My self died years ago. Do this job a few more years and you won’t feel anything either.”
“That’s promising.”
“It is. Kills the amygdala. No feelings. So you don’t grossed out, don’t get nervous, don’t care. You can just think. Rationally. Look at this, what we’re looking at.”
“I see it.”
“That’s emotion. I don’t want any emotion in my life. I just want simple logic.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“Only if you feel.”
“I do.”
“Well, you better let that go. Otherwise, you won’t be making it through Christmas. And we need you for next Fourth of July. I heard it’s gonna be busy on that day.”
Bio: Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to Beck’s “The Golden Age.”
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