Short Story Read/Rate thread

Welp. Decided to write a short story. Sat down and hammered out 2300 words in one shot. It's pretty gruesome, somewhat graphic. Read on, if you feel like it. Leave a rating, short critique, and a short story of your own (less than 2500 words), and I'll return the favor.

~~~

The ice was a lot thicker on the stairs than I thought it would be. Winter in this part of the world was a lot harsher than where I was from, but I had always been steady on my feet. I stepped lightly, feeling the cheap boards bend under my weight, the ice crackling in the still night. Snow was falling, thick enough that it almost obscured the mobile home in the next lot over.
Yellow light pushed out of the windows, dirty and covered over with bedsheets as curtains. Mounds of trash sat on the porch; broken toys, broken dishes, broken computers, and black bags of refuse collected the snow as it fell. Inside, I could hear a low rumble of a man's voice talking, and the nasally response of a woman within. I paused in front of the door, listening to their conversation. I couldn't make out much of it, but what I could hear was about some sort of occult bullshit. He always loved playing the teacher.

I could smell the cat and dog piss, even from outside. The slatted window on the door was cracked just enough that the warm, wet air assaulted my nose as I stood there. The screen door lay off to the side, a bent and crumpled heap, barely visible under the previous snowfall. I reached to my right hip, feeling the comforting weight of the handgun there. On my left, as corny and stupid as it seemed, even to me, hung a sword, a knock-off katana that nonetheless was sturdy enough to survive actually being used. A roll of duct tape sat around the handle.

I took a deep breath and raised my fist, wrapped as it was in a leather glove, to pound on the door. I paused again, listening. In the background, I could hear a television playing. Some movie of some sort, with sirens and gunfire and shouting. Not a kid's movie. Hopefully, she wasn't here. I didn't need her seeing what I was about to do.

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I slammed my fist against the door three times, then stepped back, pulling my handgun from the holster on my hip. It was an extra long draw, because of the silencer I had screwed onto the end, and the tip snagged on the leather, but I got it clear. I pointed the barrel directly at the lowest pane of the glass.
“We're not being loud!” the man's voice shouted from inside. The television noises had stopped; they had either paused or muted whatever they had playing. I waited for the sound of footsteps, but heard nothing. After about ten seconds, I reached out and hammered on the door again. The man curse, and snapped at the woman. “Go see what the fuck they want.”

“But, who could it be...?”

“I don't care who it is, get your ass up and do what I told you!”

I could recognize that shuffling, plodding step anywhere. She flounced and drug her feet at the same time. My own teenage daughter waked much the same, the last time I had seen her. My pulse quickened, thundering in my ears as she grabbed the doorknob and whipped the door open.

“What the fuck do you wa...”

Her eyes went wide as she saw the barrel of my handgun pointed directly at her chest. Her eyes went up to meet mine, and they got even wider.

“You... how... oh god!” she stammered as she tripped backwards, falling over a stool. I stepped into the mobile home as the man rose from his seat, turning to face me. The smell of chemicals and pot smoke filled my nose, mixing with the animal smells is a nauseating way. I kicked the door closed, and thankfully, the latch caught. Too often, in shitty mobile homes like these, the doors took two or three tries to latch closed. It seems that luck was in my favor.

I kept the gun leveled on the woman, as I turned to look at the man. “Is she here?”

“What the fuck, Jesus, man, what are you doing here?”

“Answer my fucking question. Is your daughter here?”

The woman stuttered at me. “N-no, she's at h-her gramma's for the week.”

“Alright.” I shot her twice in the chest, then put another round in her forehead. At this range, I couldn't miss. The first two bullets parted the ridiculous black leather and lace top she was wearing, wrecking the only redeeming factor she had. The third bullet made her face look even worse than it already had.

The movies always show silencers making a whisper of a gunshot. That is not the case at all. They make a gun quieter, that's very true, but they don't completely erase the sound. While I didn't need ear protection, it was loud. Loud enough to be heard outside, but quiet enough to be mistaken for a gunshot on the movie they were watching.

I turned to face the man as he fell backwards, shouting. “Oh god, oh Jesus fuck, oh fucking Jesus, no!”
I advanced on him, stepping over piles of filth and rot. Dirty dishes and laundry were strewn about, making navigation difficult under normal circumstances, but these were not normal circumstances.

“No no no no no no no!”He scrambled backwards, knocking over a coffee table that was covered in books, tarot cards, herbs, candles, and glassware. Small white crystals that were being crushed up into powder, and a baggie of weed were amongst the wreckage on the floor. I bent down to pick up one of the crystals, and examined it.

“Really? Meth? You've sank a lot farther than I thought you had.” I kept the gun trained on him. “Get up.”
He stared at me, his dusky skin more pale than I had ever seen it before, not moving. I put a round through the television next to him. “I said, get up. Now.”

He scrambled to his feet his hands up. “Please don't kill me, please, I have a daughter, I don't want to die-”
I cut him off. “I know fully well about your daughter.” I gestured with the gun to a low backed wooden chair, the kind they have at some diners, with shitty wooden arms. “Sit there, and I won't shoot you.”
He stumbled through the filth and over the now broken furniture, his wide eyes glued on me. When he took his seat, I tossed the roll of duct tape to him. “Tape yourself to the legs. Ten turns per leg.

His hands shook as he wrapped the tape around his ankles, attaching them to the legs of the chair. The whole time, I kept the barrel of the gun pointed at his skull. He kept whispering to himself, “Oh god, oh Jesus, oh shit, oh god...”

When he had finished with his ankles, I pointed at his right arm. “Now that one.”

Slowly, he started wrapping the tape around his arm, securing it to the chair. “What are you going to do?” he asked, his voice shaky, barely above a whisper.

I took a step closer to him, making him cringe and hold up his left hand, as if to block me. “I'm going to fucking shoot you if you don't hurry up with that tape.”

He wrapped the tape around his arm. “Why are you doing this to me?”

I tore the tape off the roll. “You goddamn well know why. Now put your other arm down.

As immobilized as he was, I was able to tape his left arm to the chair, like his right arm was. His eyes went off of me, and locked onto the dead woman on their kitchen floor. “Why did you kill her?”

“Because she knew, and chose to hide it from me. When I found out, she chose to leap in and make it worse.”

“Why now? Why after all these years?”

I tore the roll of tape off of the binding, and tossed it aside. “Because you finally won. She left me. I forgave her, we tried to work it out, but in the end, she couldn't live with a man who knew that she cheated on him.” I holstered my handgun, and crouched in front of him, my face level with his. “It's true that she was the one that left me, but it was you that started it. It was you. When I took you out of the cold. When I gave you a place to live. When I got you a job, when I fed you and kept a roof over your fucking head.” I reached out and punched him in the jaw, whipping his head to the side. I'm pretty sure I broke a few knuckles when I hit him... my form was horrible.

I stood up, shaking my hand as he started sobbing. “I am going to kill you, you know. I don't just walk away from this. You don't just walk away.” I grabbed him by the face, pulling it around so he could see me. “Fucking look at me when I'm talking to you. I. Am going. To end. Your life. Not because you fucked her. Not because she cheated on me with you. But because you betrayed me.”

He started shouting and rocking back and forth, screaming for help. I drew my handgun, and shot him in the stomach. His shouting turned into screaming, so I turned the gun around, and struck him in the jaw with the butt of it as hard as I could. It knocked him over, but it also broke his jaw. His screaming turned into gurgling as blood flowed into his throat, making him choke.

I grabbed the back of the chair, hauling it upright. “You have no idea how many times I had this dream. How I planned this out.” I'm pretty sure he wasn't listening at this point, he was too busy choking and gagging. “I was going to cut off your balls and leave your dick. Or I was going to cut off your dick and leave your balls. Or I was going to cut off your dick and feed it to her.” I gestured towards the dead woman. Yeah, he wasn't even listening anymore.

I holstered my pistol again, and stood, drawing my sword. As much as I loved it, it suddenly felt cheap in my hands. Oh well. I was committed now. “But this? This is cleaner. Not for you, but for me. This is more applicable, more... poetic. But mostly just because fuck you.”

His eyes were wide as he sat in the chair, stiff from pain and staring at me. I think he said please. I think he begged. But I couldn't understand him, as his jaw was shattered. I swung with everything I had.

Surprisingly, it worked. I half expected it to stick on a bone or meat or something like that. I didn't expect it to actually work. I remembered being surprised when I had to kill my first animal. I had used this very sword, and cut the head off of a goat. It shocked me then how little resistance there had been, just as it did now. We humans are very, very fragile things.

I sat down in another chair, facing him. His head had fallen to the side, shattered jaw all asked, blinking up at the ceiling. That creeped me the fuck out, and I emptied the rest of my bullets into it, obliterating the skull. Blood and gray matter splattered everywhere, all over the matted carpet, black from the filth and disgust that had been trampled into it.

After I sat there for a while, I glanced at the clock. Two thirty in the morning. Well. Time to finish up. I stepped back outside, and walked down the block, being sure to step in the places where the snow hadn't accumulated. In the back of my vehicle was two five gallon tanks of gas, and two canisters of propane. I carried them back to the mobile home, and doused everything in gasoline. Beds, couches, both bodies, his daughter's room, everything. I left the canisters there, sitting on the couch.

In each bedroom, I placed a propane canister, and turned it on full blast. I shut the doors, letting the gas build up in the rooms. In the kitchen, I turned on the gas burners on the stove, then I blew out the pilot light on their wall furnace. So many gas appliances.

I picked up one of the candles that had been sitting on the coffee table. It was a black candle, shaped like a man and woman mid-coitus, the wick coming out between their heads. I placed it on the ground, where the table had been, and lit it. The clock was ticking now. I left, and got in my vehicle.

I started the car, but left the lights off. I parked again down the street, about four blocks away. I could still see the yellow light through the mobile home windows, even through the snow.

At three thirty, there was a flash, and then a deafening boom, as the shockwave shook my car. House and car alarms were going off everywhere. I started my engine, and drove towards the highway, which was maybe five minutes away. By the time emergency personnel got there, I'd be heading down the freeway.
I turned on my headlights and windshield wipers as I accelerated to sixty. Even though the speed limit was seventy, one couldn't be too careful on these snowy nights. The dotted white line that separated the lanes turned into a bit of a blur as I zoned out into the drive.

Well shit. What now?

bump

Boink.

You know there's a critique thread for this sort of thing, right? You don't have to make your own like you're something special.

An important part of being a good writer is observation skills, obviously you have none as you're unaware of the above so I don't even need to read your story to know it's bad.

No, I didnt see the thread. But if you feel like just taking a snark shit, by all means. Can't stop you there. Because, obv, that is the most important thing.