My Aim Is True

“Authorities report that Jeffry Trent Bit killed his mother, his father, and his brothers while they slept.  Each was killed with a single arrow in the heart.  Neighbors expressed surprised.  “He was such a good boy,” one neighbor said “He was a model student,” said another.  Bit was a straight A student, an Eagle Scout, the leader of his Church Youth Group, a semi-finalist in the state wide spelling bee, an all league player in football, and an Olympic Quality Archer.   Although injured in several places, Bit’s attempts to kill himself with a bow and arrow proved futile.”

 When I come across a story like that I, depending upon the morbidity of my mood, either turn quickly to another page or read all the lurid details.  I passed a good deal of time in my sophomore and junior years in high school having fanaticizes about killing my parents.  Actually, it was pretty much the same fantasy.  For some reason, unknown to me, the massacre always happened in the kitchen.  My parents would be bound and gagged.  The fantasy did not include how I bound and gagged them; they came in fantasy land prepackaged for massacre.

 First I would cut mother’s throat.  She would bleed out, as it were, while slumped against our pea green refrigerator.  The idea was that the old man might suffer even more if he saw his wife dying.  So then I would cut his throat, and he would slump up against the cabinets under the kitchen sink.

 While entertaining these fantasies, my blood pressure would go up; I would begin to sweat.  Sometimes though I would get all hung up and the fantasy would go bad because I couldn’t figure out which of them I wanted to suffer more and thus I couldn’t figure out which one to kill first so that the other one would have to suffer the death of the other.  My reason with its attempt to calculate pain would get in the way and the fantasy would pop like a worn balloon.

 I don’t know why I didn’t carry out the fantasy.  Thank goodness we had no guns in the house.  And I didn’t have a bow and arrow either.  I didn’t fit the profile.  I wasn’t a straight A student; I was an atheist; I spelled poorly; I played varsity basketball but was not all league, and I wasn’t an Eagle Scout.  I was a “Life” Scout; that’s the one before Eagle, but I never got Eagle because I couldn’t swim well enough to get the “Life Saver” merit badge.

 I was imperfect.