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A Flap of Familiar Skin
The lovely woman's hand spattered with scarlet-red fresh blood still clutched a bright sunshine-yellow box of Cheerios as her body crumpled onto the cold gray-slate floor of her kitchen decorated in an Inside Style decorator's scheme of cobalt blue and bright winter white accented with warm cherrywood, cabinets sawed, mitered and drilled by her father, as it was his hobby, although he was a mathematical genius who worked at Motorola, and his wife, her mother, was the one who had introduced Michael to her at last year's Christmas party, he being the gangly, tongue-tied son of Christopher and Julia Patchen, long-time friends of Mom and Dad Bukowski, who had trouble explaining to the police that they were at a key party at the Magnuson's on that fateful wee-hours morning when their blue-eyed daughter was bludgeoned by, most likely a man over six-feet tall, who wore black ostrich-skin gloves bought at Macys's 24-hour Sale held the first weekend in November of every year, the gloves not being that interesting since the store had sold over 14,000 pair and both Christina's father and Michael, her boyfriend, soon to be her fiancé, wore them as did lots of other men of a certain financial status who rode the commuter train back and forth to the city filled with skyscrapers of make-busy men who thought nothing of spending $115.00 on gloves with which to party-spank their mistresses on one of those extended lunches in the loft, although Michael had merely a small condo for "entertaining" he liked to leave the women "marked"…sharp red raised lashes on their thighs and backs, he carefully avoided the face the working-women told the detectives, yet Christina had three distinct lesions, long, and fire-red mad, on her left cheek, which led to Michael being questioned for hours in a tiny room with a video camera running and two hard-ass cops breathing in his face, still, months later no arrests had been made although there was a Fahrenheit-451 outcry from the public to fry someone, anyone, the father and mother always on television making pleas through tears and rubbed raw faces PLEASE HELP US FIND OUR DAUGHTER'S MURDERER! Until one day, on the second of February, Ground Hog Day, when the winter's demise or ascent is folklorically prognosticated, Mr. Jerry Bukowski, senior partner of the law firm of Bukowski, Grante, and Breslan, wife of Nora, father of Christina, 22, of Farmington Heights, Jeremy, 24, Bluefish Bay, OR, and Mark, 27, Chicago, strode into the police station at 147 Cherry Avenue and standing upright in his crumpled beige raincoat asked the desk clerk for Detective Larson, who had been the one to lead the forensics attainment from those first moments when yellow tape was strung around the house and through the yard of his daughter's little Cape Cod on North Riverside Drive, when Jerry had cried loud and angrily, knowing he had given up fucking Mrs. Patchen so he could finally take care of his lovely daughter for the final time.
"She was only meant to be mine." he said. "…only mine." With that, Gerald Bukowski, 54, of Bridgeport, slips his large soft hand into his vest pocket, pulls out a bright silver Derringer, sticks it between his flaccid lips, cocks it upward, and pulls the trigger.
