forbidden to touch the stereo on pain of death, and she presumed the ban was still in place, which didn’t bother her as, on the infrequent weekends when she came home, she spent her time listening to reggae on the Walkman that lay upstairs in her bedroom.
She lifted the lid and sheathed the disc in its sleeve that she returned to the shelf and spent a moment pondering her father’s record collection before she withdrew another LP—Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies”, surely an unwanted gift—and settled it on the turntable.
She made sure that the headphones, enormous puffy things with a coiled black cable, were plugged in and slipped them over her ears.
A slim burnished metal rectangle beside the turntable sported a couple of buttons and dials and she jabbed at what she assumed was the power switch, triggering a low and somehow ominous hum. A green light bloomed and the needle of one of the dials twitched.
So far so good.
When she lifted the curved tone arm from its little cradle the record started to rotate slowly.
Holding her breath—still fearful of her cold, controlling father—she gently lowered the stylus onto the grooved vinyl.
There was a sucking hiss, like distant surf breaking, before the sweet, dissonant piano filled the air. Tanya settled into the armchair reserved for her father’s hours of solitary music appreciation and closed her eyes. The melancholy beauty of the Satie, in combination with the night of debauch and vague depression from the hangover sent her to sleep.
She woke as the record ended and, with a series of delicate clucks, the turntable arm lifted and settled itself back in its cradle, the ticking of the clock almost menacing when she removed the headphones
As Tanya rose from the chair the semen of the nameless man dripped from her. She turned off the stereo and stowed the headphones, surprised that her father hadn’t already come down and caught her in the act.
She was desperate for a shower and there was nothing for it but to climb the stairs, her limbs aching and her lower regions sending out distress signals as her jeans chafed at them.
She had to pass her parents’ bedroom en route to hers and was about to creep past the door that stood ajar when something gave her pause. The porcelain figurine of a Victorian shepherdess that had forever adorned her mother’s vanity table lay on the wooden floor of the landing, the bonneted head severed from the body and the arm carrying the crook lying in pieces nearby.
A low hum reached Tanya’s ears and when a meat fly landed on her bare arm she realized what she was hearing was the insistent moan of scores of those insects. She stepped toward the door, the bed invisible from where she stood, a shaft of hard sunlight striking a pale oyster wall hung with three antique Chinese brushpaintings of mist-clad mountains, rivers and waterfalls.
Something, some kind of decoration, was draped atop the paintings and Tanya wondered what had inspired her mother to this atypical frivolity.
Her mind, still fogged by booze, was slow to process that what she was seeing was no decoration: it was a length of human intestine.
This realization struck her when she nudged open the door revealing the charnel house within.
Her parents, in their night clothes, lay side by side on the double bed with its ornate brass head and footboards. Their bodies and the bed, floor and walls were awash with their blood, and the room seethed with a black shroud of meat flies.
Her mother and father had been hacked to death and the hacking had not stopped until limbs had been nearly severed and bone and viscera exposed.
The killer had then removed her father’s intestines and draped them on the picture frames, letting them dangle down to the black lacquer wood vanity where a bottle of her mother’s Arpège lay shattered, the cloying perfume mixing with the ripe stench of blood and shit.
Tanya, vomit spewing from her mouth and landing on the face of Robert Mugabe,
She lifted the lid and sheathed the disc in its sleeve that she returned to the shelf and spent a moment pondering her father’s record collection before she withdrew another LP—Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies”, surely an unwanted gift—and settled it on the turntable.
She made sure that the headphones, enormous puffy things with a coiled black cable, were plugged in and slipped them over her ears.
A slim burnished metal rectangle beside the turntable sported a couple of buttons and dials and she jabbed at what she assumed was the power switch, triggering a low and somehow ominous hum. A green light bloomed and the needle of one of the dials twitched.
So far so good.
When she lifted the curved tone arm from its little cradle the record started to rotate slowly.
Holding her breath—still fearful of her cold, controlling father—she gently lowered the stylus onto the grooved vinyl.
There was a sucking hiss, like distant surf breaking, before the sweet, dissonant piano filled the air. Tanya settled into the armchair reserved for her father’s hours of solitary music appreciation and closed her eyes. The melancholy beauty of the Satie, in combination with the night of debauch and vague depression from the hangover sent her to sleep.
She woke as the record ended and, with a series of delicate clucks, the turntable arm lifted and settled itself back in its cradle, the ticking of the clock almost menacing when she removed the headphones
As Tanya rose from the chair the semen of the nameless man dripped from her. She turned off the stereo and stowed the headphones, surprised that her father hadn’t already come down and caught her in the act.
She was desperate for a shower and there was nothing for it but to climb the stairs, her limbs aching and her lower regions sending out distress signals as her jeans chafed at them.
She had to pass her parents’ bedroom en route to hers and was about to creep past the door that stood ajar when something gave her pause. The porcelain figurine of a Victorian shepherdess that had forever adorned her mother’s vanity table lay on the wooden floor of the landing, the bonneted head severed from the body and the arm carrying the crook lying in pieces nearby.
A low hum reached Tanya’s ears and when a meat fly landed on her bare arm she realized what she was hearing was the insistent moan of scores of those insects. She stepped toward the door, the bed invisible from where she stood, a shaft of hard sunlight striking a pale oyster wall hung with three antique Chinese brushpaintings of mist-clad mountains, rivers and waterfalls.
Something, some kind of decoration, was draped atop the paintings and Tanya wondered what had inspired her mother to this atypical frivolity.
Her mind, still fogged by booze, was slow to process that what she was seeing was no decoration: it was a length of human intestine.
This realization struck her when she nudged open the door revealing the charnel house within.
Her parents, in their night clothes, lay side by side on the double bed with its ornate brass head and footboards. Their bodies and the bed, floor and walls were awash with their blood, and the room seethed with a black shroud of meat flies.
Her mother and father had been hacked to death and the hacking had not stopped until limbs had been nearly severed and bone and viscera exposed.
The killer had then removed her father’s intestines and draped them on the picture frames, letting them dangle down to the black lacquer wood vanity where a bottle of her mother’s Arpège lay shattered, the cloying perfume mixing with the ripe stench of blood and shit.
Tanya, vomit spewing from her mouth and landing on the face of Robert Mugabe,
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