When people say love is blind they’re half right, it’s a temporary blindness.

You fall in love and see perfection and that’s all you see for a while until ominous, portentous ‘comfort’ creeps in. Comfortable in this context sheds all its warm, desirable connotations and swaps them for an arduous boredom, a rippled ennui so deep and rich it makes you want to obliterate the source however you can.
This is how I feel about Marie.
When I was young and stupid nothing she could do would even register, I had been isolated for so long I had forgotten what love looked like. She could induce vitality, cultivate things inside me that would envelop and meander around my internal antagonists, throttling them, before blooming with a dazzling incandescence. Mesmerising flashes of brilliant colour and light surrounded her wherever she went. A rare, magnetised, effusive aura of infectious lust crashing overhead and catching you in its riptide, dragging anything in its vicinity into open water, further from shore, further from safety. I was dead until I met her; it only seems fitting that she should be the one to kill me. It was her beauty that had seduced me but over the years my view of her has become gradually emaciated by the vacuous and malevolent nature I had once mistaken for stoicism and sniping wit. Now even her looks are fading, ten years can do that to a woman, especially with a soul as ugly and Machiavellian as hers. Most people realise that societies observation of aesthetic beauty is transient and ultimately meaningless, that the inevitable and superficial changes enforced by time add character. Marie is under the impression she can beat it, that she has discovered the fountain of youth. This particular fountain, Dr. Karl Grossman, is some sort of awful hybrid of plastic surgeon and dermatologist. Quite how this buffoon of a man made it through medical college is beyond me, his frizzy red tuft of hair, pantomime movements and bulbous, vermilion alcoholics nose give off an aura not of a competent doctor but a Chaplin-esque circus clown. His business acumen however cannot be questioned; I have somehow paid this rat of a man tens of thousands over the last four years too slice my wife into what now resembles a badly drawn caricature of Anthea Turner. She’s had it all, fat transfer, hylaform, thread lift, laser treatment, the list is almost infinite; her new face is worth more than my car. You may regard me as iniquitous but if I am it is down to her.
I blame her.
Blame her for becoming boring, for losing my edge, for disregarding what I love, for having endured Summer of ’78 by Barry fucking Manilow, for being trapped behind a white picket fence, for being someone I wasn’t, for becoming morose and resentful, for wasting my best years, for getting old, for feeling old.
I am vacant again.
I don’t blame her for this, I’ve always been empty, for a short while she filled me with a tangled, opaque façade of happiness, but once the knot was slipped and I was hung deception dissipated into the atmosphere like a toxic gas.
Now there are only windows of true connection.

Every weekday at 9.30 I go to work. My office is a sterile, dead place, a baron wasteland scattered with equally dull ‘features’ if you can call anything transparent a feature. It endorses, practically promotes impotence.
Everything in here that isn’t diaphanous is an off kilter gruelish colour, somewhere between white, blue and gray. The ridiculous thing is Marie’s father, who gave me this job, paid some counterfeit interior designer £50,000. The fraudulent ‘expert’ then took this money removed everything and gave the whole department the feel of a Gulag run Siberian labour camp. Supposedly it ‘promotes work ethic, functionality and focus by getting rid of distractions and uncluttering workspace using clean minimalist design strategy.’
All it promotes in me is nausea. I started working here about seven years ago, after being given a house and a car, I’m on a very healthy six figure income and I have never done a days work, I don’t even know what my job entails.
Mr Pierce, Joe outside these walls, tells me that I’m ‘in charge of an elite team of sales representatives,’ but in my seven years here I have spoken to them exactly seven times, at Christmas parties, most of them don’t even know who I am.
Four of them told me for the first six months they would observe me through the glass walls fearing for their jobs, thinking I was something they called a ‘tactical streamliner’ brought in to get rid of any dead wood. ‘On the contrary, I’m simply a man who sits behind a desk’ I reassured them, in half jest.
Lying face down at my desk I’m stirred by an e-mail notification, it’s from Marie reminding me of a lunch date we have today.

Tom,

Marie x

After reading the e-mail I begin to laugh as my doped up brain sees the comedy in the tragic situation. OxyContin or ‘hillbilly heroin’ if you’re a consumer of sensationalist media, is one of the most adaptable pharmaceuticals on the market. You can shoot it, snort it or ingest it as normal, hell you can bake it in a fucking space cake and the effect is still the same, pure mental oblivion.
The perfect drug for somebody like me.
If chewed it produces a mellow high that doesn’t make you lose control or even show any signs that you’re on anything at all. Insufflated it produces a much more intense, if short lived hit, for instant relief from all of life’s woes. I was first prescribed it five years ago by my GP after a skiing accident that left me in traction for 3 weeks. After my spine had recovered I was in so much pain I was approved OxyContin as its slow release pill form means it provides sufficient relief all day, it wasn’t long before I was grinding it up for a faster harder hit.
I am now an addict, I say it without shame as it helps me through the day, without it I’m sure I would lose my mind. Once the prescription ran out I had to find other ways of getting the drug, I managed to find Charles, an underpaid male nurse at the Crest View Hospital. He supplements his meager wage by ransacking the drug store and selling overpriced prescription pharmaceuticals to addicts for a sickening profit, of course we’re happy to pay.

At 12.15 I dutifully meet Marie outside the restaurant, ‘Tom, you look like hell,’ are the first words her noxious tongue spits at me.
I instantly lose patience, ‘well thank you,’ I retort sarcastically, ‘let’s just get this awful business over with shall we?’

Cold blinding indifference is all I can seem to muster now as Marie’s carbonated streams of bullshit crash into me, a deafening flux of banal stupidity. There was a time, when I was less tired perhaps, that I could block it out, or at least deflect it and let those around me suffocate in her vacuum. The sickening realisation that these meticulously aimed statements of moronic intent have begun to slowly but pertinaciously penetrate the back reach bush of my subconscious rocks me, and I worry that I’m starting to think like her.
‘His stuff is fantastic, he recently exhibited in Paris . . . oh Jean I forgot to tell you I saw Joanne Matthews the other day, she was wearing a beautiful cropped lace top, there are so in vogue, I think I may have to be naughty and treat myself to an early birthday present!’
This maladroit transition from the topic of a new pretentious artist she has decided to espouse to casual fashion makes me realise its impossible to think like somebody you hate.
‘So Tom, your good wife’s under the knife again, breast augmentation old chap, bet your thrilled aren’t you?’ This vulgar question pulls my attention from one odious conversation and throws me into another.
Before I can answer Marie butts in, ‘Doctor,’ she giggles like a lascivious school girl, ‘you are wicked . . . I’m getting them as a present for Tom, give him a couple of extra cup sizes to contend with.’ I’m unsure how she manages to articulate this fabrication with a straight face knowing full well we haven’t had sex in over a year.
They continue to talk about me as if I am absent.
‘Well I’m sure he will be more than happy with the job I do on you, I will make you even more stunning than you are already,’ turning his tenebrous face to mine he winks, ‘no mean feat old chap.’
‘Oh Karl, that’s so sweet,’ she whispers in adoration and taking him by his pinched skeletal hand adds ‘I always know I’m safe with you.’
Her foot brushes past mine on the way to his crotch, she doesn’t notice.
‘You know I could never let anything happen to you Marie.’ He responds, kissing her hand and contorting his weasel face into something that reminds me of a smile but never quite peaks at one.
I have been aware that my wife is having an affair with Grossman for a while now; this is however the first time I have been confronted with it. The fact that my wife is having an affair is not was bothers me, our distorted idea of monogamy only goes as far as keeping the identity of the third party secret, a rule my darling wife has, on this occasion, decided to ignore.
Now I know it’s him, all I can do is think of their disgusting concepts of eroticism.
The joyless, impersonal setting of an operating theatre permeated by two naked figures coated white in the harsh artificial light. They simulate people but move like numinous robots, completely void of anything that isn’t perfunctory or mechanical.
Drawing closer reveals them as corrupted clones of the familiar. Grossmans spindly body looms over her, his cadaverous fingers reaching for cold steel before lacerating fresh, deathly exotic orifices into her spotless torso. Marie writhes under dark reassuring stratus clouds of black, emanating from the Doctors dishonest mouth, a naïve white horse surfing the wave of a vast and intense meridian I could never permeate her with.
‘E-e-excuse me,’ I hurriedly stutter rising to my feet in a confused attempt to exorcise this horrific image from my head, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Off too drain the snake old chap?’ Grossman shouts in his billingsgate fashion, I don’t answer.

Walking into the cubicle I calculate exactly how many 40mg pills I will need to get through this harrowing luncheon and take out my snuffbox.
‘Two should do it,’ I think out loud. I chew on one while I place the other on the toilet stall and crush it with my wedding ring. Once I have pounded the hard tablet into fine chemical confetti I cut it into three perfect lines and inhale one a minute with a makeshift banknote nozzle. After the third stroke the rushing euphoric high hauls me out of the cubicle, out of the toilet and into my past. I think of and question all the times I’ve tried to go clean.
Memories of rare horrifying feelings.
Explosive bones detonating on a cellular level, sending sharp mineral encrusted ossein bullets ripping through me in slow motion. Blood the temperature of fire, every heartbeat pumping pure molten pain around every part of the body. The constant sickness, a malady so unrelenting and remorseless every heave clutches the stomach in a vice like grip before convulsing the solar plexus like a buckshot to the gut. Ears tuned into the constant screaming of opiate receptors spraying white noise and confusion into the brain while the nervous system seems to howl and asphyxiate in an enzymatic inferno.
Life is now suffering without this drug.
Walking back into the derelict crash pad of my life I felt more comfortable, safe in clandestine synthetic sanctuary and ready for their onslaught.

I happily sat in silence and watched their words animate themselves and dance around their casual heads, electric monologues, betraying everything they were and are, horrid junkies of attention. I think about decapitating Grossman and putting an apple in his mouth like a roast pig, he already looks like one. I knew I would have to confront him but this was not the time or place, ‘no’, I thought, ‘it has to be perfect, I want him to curl into the foetal position and call for his mother.’

So here I find myself, sitting in an acquaintances vineyard with a head full of stolen wine and opiates clutching a pistol; waiting for the adulterous couple to return. Expecting a night of passionate infidelity, a welcome break from his disused wife, the Doctor will instead find a handgun and corybantic fervour.
Grossman will snivel and beg for a forgiveness that won’t ever come and Marie will lust at my authority, its all part of the game. It all started when I found out about Marie’s first betrayal, Tristan Vek, a guy from the office I played squash with on occasion. I gutted him with a Stanley knife, Marie found out and we made fanatical love for the first time in 2 years. My jealous act had made her want me, her total moral abandon made me want her, it is in these brief passages of execution that we function. In the four years since that night we have had sex seven times with seven enabling cadavers there to witness it. Infidelity with Marie however is not a death sentence, the game has 5 simple rules; they’re written down somewhere:

Rules of the game.

1. The third party has to come into Marie’s life naturally, no looking for people to play with.
2. Marie must introduce the third party to me.
3. I must work out that the affair is happening, no clues.
4. I must find that person unbearable.
5. The confrontation and method of murder must be a complete surprise to Marie.

As I revise the rules in my head I hear a key turn in the door downstairs and my breath turns sharp and animalistic as primal, wicked urges take me over. Soon the medical panjandrum would be dead, unable to use his years of learning to stop himself being extinguished.
The irony of this makes me smile.
As they walk through the door I pistol-whip the doctor’s mouth so hard I’m sure I’ve broken his jaw. I hear a weak feeble voice escape his whimpering mouth and realise the wound is less severe.
‘take anything you want . . . just don’t hurt us . . . please!’
‘oh I will be taking what I want alright, I’ll be taking my wife back for a start you slimeball.
‘TOM?! TOM HORNER?!’
‘Yes dear, my husband, Tom.’ Marie whispers seductively into his ear before tonguing his bloodied mouth, ‘he’s probably known about us for some time’ she adds before dragging him by what little hair he has left and positioning him in front of me and kissing me.
Her mouth tastes sharp and metallic from the blood and I smile at her for the first time in months.
‘YOU BITCH!’ Grossman screams.
‘Oh dear Karl, did you just call my wife a bitch? I’ve killed men for less.’ I state with a wry unwavering smile.
‘Please god . . . please god . . . please god’ Grossman mutters under his foul breath, unable to look at me.
‘God? God is an illusion created by the vanity of man old chap,’ I spit back at him, ‘how ironic that you call for a god you have helped fabricate, no Karl, there will be no help from him up there, not for you, not for an adulterer Grossman.’
As Grossman contemplates my secular hypothesis and wrestles with its connotations I lower the pistol to the back of his anxious, whimpering head; Marie’s wild eyes followed my hand and I notice how beautiful she looks draped in moonlight and betrayal.
A low rumbling pop rings out across the exclusive and isolated Horne Valley, never to be heard by anyone; Mother Nature loses one of her bastard children in an act of excited brutality.

Lying half asleep I stroke Marie’s long seductive hair and try to engage in her post-coitus pillow talk.
‘Tom?’
‘Yes dear?’
‘Do you think we’ll ever be caught?’
‘I hope not Marie, the possibility of these moments is the only reason I haven’t put a noose around my neck.’
What’s wrong with us Tom? . . . this isn’t normal.’
‘Normal’s just a point of view honey . . . go to sleep.’
‘Don’t dismiss it Tom, you’re not listening to me.’
‘I switch off when your lips move.’
Pushing me away, turning her back on me she says, ‘Your such an ass Tom.’
Sinking into the comfortable void of slumber I think, ‘Here we go again.’