Death of Legions
by Alexei Raymond
He delivers death to legions—whence, he does not know, and why never crosses his mind. The only questions are how and to whom.
*****
By age ten, he is a seasoned killer. He walks home from school quietly and alone; he exists in the uneasy element of bilingual silence. Once he throws off his backpack in his empty home and steps outside to wander the gardens and lush fields nearby, he becomes the dread of all that lives beneath leaf, rock, and rotten trunk, of all that flutters over flowers, crawls in crevices, and scampers on vibrating stems. He is the ruinous flood that washes away ant colonies, the fire that roasts squirming, sightless worms, the microwave that makes hard beetles boil and burst and break, and the needle that skewers them all: chitin, flesh, and bone. He’s spent years honing his craft, since the day he’s been autonomous enough to survey the earth beneath him and somehow be unafraid of those that run underfoot. He never stops coming up with new methods to bring about death, dismemberment, and disintegration. He melts plastic bags to rain fiery death; he deploys bombs that hiss colored smoke and leave behind green, blue, and red Pompeii ants in their path; he drives the sharp mandibles of intimidating beetles to eviscerate the flesh of softer forms of life. Rare are those who survive once his eyes set on them.
And despite how skillfully he administers death to varieties, his work with the occasional gecko—the largest being he brutalizes—is his masterstroke. His deadly entomology mostly allows him to realize a mere one or two death-dealing ideas before an arthropod becomes unresponsive debris, but the relatively expansive biology of the gecko affords him more to play with. It is a fascination from first sight: how their tails detach in terror, trying to distract the towering child—how they spasm for a few more lingering moments. He appreciates the curious mechanism as his finger probes the point of detachment on a twitching tail. When the tail ceases its throes, he focuses on the rest of the gecko, which, through no fault of its own—God rest its soul!—has failed to escape the boy’s clutches; tail thrown off in vain. To engage in what he cannot explain, he goes back home with the gecko in hand. He does not know why he feels the need for privacy and secrecy, but he does not allow himself to start in earnest before he is in his shadowy, cool room. There, the boy who gravitates downward, whose eyes can at most scan walls for agile movement but not the eyes of peers, engages in a delicate chirurgical session.
In the hour—sometimes thirty minutes—it takes to extract all life from the overpowered, nimble lizard, the unattended child employs his instruments: a needle and thread stolen from his grandmother, a lighter taken from the kitchen, a pencil retrieved from his backpack, and his own practiced, pale fingers. Before the torment begins, he observes—uncharacteristically gentle—the almost-translucent abdomen of the gecko as it rises and falls with frail life. He can see the minute ribs and how they stretch the scaled skin. His finger, when placed flat against the cool abdomen, does not look like it is capable of violence—such violence. When he finally begins, the boy’s demeanor remains much the same; there is no snarling glee, nor excited giggling. It is as if the boy is calm and simply mesmerized by the act of testing the mortality of the gecko. No line of thought threads the acts together; no internal narration guides him from inflicting one excruciating wound after the other. The boy’s blue eyes are dark in the shadowed room. The gecko’s yellow eyes are cloven by a dark, vertical slit. While it still has strength, it snaps its fragile jaw shut onto the flesh of the boy’s tormenting fingers. Neither set of eyes belies purpose or understanding of what is unequally exchanged between the two bodies, and neither makes a sound. The room's silence is broken by sporadic clicks of the lighter. And when all life is taken from the flesh that weighs hardly more than a dream, the boy rids himself of the remains through the window with a quick flick of his hand. They land somewhere in the unseen, unkempt garden below.
The boy is alone again and listless. The smell of smoke and the evidence on his fingers bother him enough to keep the window open and go wash his hands with a bar of soap. He hopes his mother will not notice the smell once she returns from work. If she does, he will say he’s been burning paper and matches. He lies on the bed and drifts off.
The most that is known about him is that he is a consort of the smaller orders of life. They do not know for certain that his touch is deadly, but the suspicion arises when life’s count is reduced in his vicinity. All that the boy knows is that their sight, before they are made captive in his inevitably lethal hands, warms his silent heart into love.
He delivers death to legions. It will happen again.
BIO: Alexei Raymond is a writer whose work explores post-Soviet diasporic lives, moments of threshold, and fractured identities. Originally from the Middle East, he is currently based in Belgrade. His stories appear in The Bloomin’ Onion, Lowlife Lit Press, and The Crawfish. Connect with him at x.com/enemyofcruelty.