The Black Sheep

It's a cold dark objective fear. His face loose folds of jowls, a sagging half squinted eyelid and a lopsided woeful expression, that hides cunning manipulation and brutality. It's a rancid stench of flies and faecal matter and musty mothballs, that clings to the throat and nasal passage. Entering the box white cottage, one up one down, dark steps into an eternity of mundane atrocities and mass genocide of blue bottles. A frozen winter, but not bone cold, the neighbours say he starved and froze, ate soil with his hands, stripped wood panels from the wall. His bulky frame denied starvation, insanity maybe, greed undoubtedly, as his hands grasped screw driver, plant pot and bread knife rapidly stabbing, bludgeoning, punching with frenzied violence the face of an old woman. Force and trauma and a wad of cash. Now three square meals a day, a warm room and cigarettes. His lopsided blood hound face stares blankly from BBC news. I think of him at night, walking across the lawn from his house to mine. I think of him in the barn, dank, dirty, a lonely space in time. The darkness of man gapes, and sits comfortably outside the window.