The Butcher

The butcher had been married for 24 years before he made himself a widower by putting a pillow on his wife's coughing face. 

He just could not handle the coughing anymore and through some messed up internal logic, he blamed his job for her death. 

He was the bartender in a discotheque, till this evening. He fired himself by setting the discotheque on fire. With all the people still inside it. And the exits locked with a heavy chain.

And from his little two room house, the butcher could hear the sirens of fire trucks as they weaved through the city's traffic and tried to put out the fire he had started. 

He hated the discotheque because they played a new strain of filthy excuse for music. The heavy bass and the mechanical sounds fucked his head up and made him feel murderous on the best of days. He just didn't understand how the people in the discotheque danced to that music. To his ears, it sounded like robots fucking and screaming at the same time. 

To cope with the noise, he was sloshed as fuck behind the bar most of the days. He didn't quit because that job was the only way he could get medicines for his wife, who coughed all day and all night. She slept while he was out on his job and coughed when he was in the house. Sometimes he felt she coughed just to irritate him. 

So, today when he entered his house, high on adrenaline, anger and murder; he heard the dreaded cough again. The pillow was his last option. He said sorry to his wife and put the pillow on her coughing face. She struggled a bit, but he was crying too loud to notice. When she stopped coughing, he felt the silence close in all around him. He had thought he'd find peace but it was only the eerie sound of silence in his ears. That sound soon became a slow pounding beat behind his eyes, it spread all over his skull and seeped into his brain. 

And in that silence, he heard a song. 

It was a man's voice and he sang like an angel. It was a nice song and he wanted to do what the song was saying. He wanted to travel. To a tower in the sea. And climb the tower, reach through the window and kill the boy inside it. 

The boy had been making noise all night. And oh, how he hated noise. 

He kissed his dead wife goodbye and left home. 

On his way out he opened the valve of a cooking gas cylinder. The house was full of gas by the time he was two blocks away. The gas found a spark under the fridge, kissed it and birthed a fireball that engulfed the small two room flat and other flats near it. 

The butcher didn't even look back.

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More tomorrow :)