I kill people. I can’t always tell you why. Other times there are reasons. Angers. Obsessions. Justices. I enjoy the hunt and the kill. I enjoy the power. The fact remains, however, that I am just a regular guy. Much like you or someone you know. Fighting my way through a world that appears but in truth is only on the surface mundane. There is complexity in much that we see that appears simple. A whole system codified by hundreds of years of reinforcement to bring you the end product that you now see. A complex web of relationships and causes and effects. In everything you see. We are all products of the system, we can’t escape it. Even me. Even monsters like me. The ones your parents warned you about. The ones you feared that night you were sleeping and swore to a sound that only you could hear and your parents told you to go back to sleep but you kept hearing it anyway and it frightened you so that you left the lights on and the nights all never seemed quite the same.

That was me.

It was the Tuesday of the big storm when I arrived in town. Hell of an initiation. It was a town not unlike your hometown called Butcher, Kansas. Well, not unlike your hometown I suppose unless you grew up in a city because Butcher wasn’t like that. But a town nevertheless not unlike so many in small town America with rumors and a Main Street and family-owned bookstores and coffeehouses and little hotels called Bed and Breakfasts. A little river coursed through the backyards of the prominent homes and tall cottonwoods gave them shade and the kids would climb their trunks and inscribe their names in the trunks when they fell and scraped their elbows. But on this day it was dark and one hell of a cloud came up behind me so my taxi driver flew down the highway and tossed my bags to the curb and was gone without even taking the tip I tried to hand him. I guess the wind musta pushed him on. It was strong that day. Real strong even as I stood in front of the hostel where I was supposed to stay and getting stronger.

If you were from Butcher, it was a day that you’d never forget. Every town has one. The day God’s great finger descends down from heaven and gets to scraping its great nail across the landscape. In California it’s the fires. In Texas it’s the flood. In Florida it’s the hurricane and in Butcher it’s the tornado. But the tornado wasn’t the only thing that the residents of Butcher would regret arriving that day. In the years to come they’d come to regret me too and with equal or greater conviction. This is, in fact, one of the great sources of artistic pride that I hold quite dear. Butcher Kansas is known for two things: that storm. And that murderer.