Acoustic Shadows by Patrick Kendrick Page A

– but was powerless to stop it. Thirty years later – and four failed marriages due to domestic assault – proved there are forbidden elements of mankind that should never be revealed to a young, impressionable mind.
    Julio held the blade out as he’d seen his father do, his hand shaking so much he thought he’d drop it. But, he didn’t. He swung it down and struck the second man, hitting him in the shoulder, down to the bone. The scream covered Julio’s arms in goose bumps.
    ‘Again!’ said Emilio. ‘Quickly.’
    Julio did as he was ordered. The blade flashed again, this time finding the man’s neck, but hardly going through. The man tried to stand and run, but one of Emilio’s men stuck out his leg and tripped him. As the man rolled on the ground, the bandana covering his eyes came off, and he looked up at Julio, his eyes pleading, blood streaming from his neck.
    Emilio came over and squatted next to the man. He pointed at the man’s throat with his index finger. ‘Right across here, Julio,’ he said, as if teaching his son how to cut firewood. Julio brought the blade down again. And again. It took several chops through bone and sinew to completely sever the man’s head.
    Julio turned, fell to his knees, and vomited. When he was able to stand up, one of the men assisted him and handed him a bottle of tequila. Julio took it and rinsed his mouth, then took another swallow that burned all the way down and filled his head with fire.
    They had pulled the last man out of the van and placed him on his knees in the condemned man’s position. He sobbed quietly.
    Emilio looked at Julio and said, ‘Again.’
    Julio teetered over; sure he could neither raise the blade again, nor swing it hard enough to do what had to be done. But, the look on his father’s face, the sneer, the disgust of having such a weak offspring, was so apparent, he did not have to hear the words. He found an anger inside himself, let it rise to a boil, and placed himself behind the man. This time, he raised the blade above his own head with both hands and, when he came back down, arcing it to the side, he put his weight into the swing. The blade was getting dull now and once again, it did not go all the way through. But, as the man fell to his side, Julio dislodged the blade, and without being coaxed this time, he swung it down again and again, until the man’s head rolled off.
    Emilio nodded to the other men and, without words, they took chainsaws from the van and cranked them up.
    Julio wondered why they had not used the chainsaws in the first place then realized it was probably because his father wanted him to ‘work’ through his emergence as a killer. Now, he felt the transformation within himself and knew at that very moment he would never be the same. But, he would also never be like his father.
    One of his father’s men – a man whom Julio had heard being referred to as
El Monstruo,
The Monster – dismembered the bodies with the chainsaw and placed them in black plastic bags. He was a frightening presence, as wide as he was tall. His eyes were as black and lifeless as a shark’s, set into acne-scarred skin. His other facial features were blunted and slightly out of place, as if the sculptor who moulded him left him in the kiln too long. His mouth hung open as if his nose did not take in air. As toad-like as he looked, his hands moved quickly with saw and blade; an efficient and experienced butcher. Once in bags, the parts were then placed into wooden shipping containers that, Julio later learned, to his horror, were shipped back to the dead men’s families.
    Emilio put his arm around his son’s shoulders, grinning as if his son had just scored the final goal at the World Cup, and said, ‘Okay.
Now
, you are a man. Let’s get cleaned up. Those lusty whores in the house want more of you, I’m sure.’ He beamed proudly as he said this, but Julio did not. Sex was absolutely the last thing on his mind at that moment.

EIGHT
    It