Story

Claudia was reading the newspaper that morning. She was reading about a man who had died in the hands of a very dangerous killer. The poor man had been tortured and the article was so descriptive that she even felt guilty of reading it. One voice inside her was saying “stop reading it, it’s sick” and another voice (the strongest) ordered her to continue.

She read about cut fingers, burnt extremities, flagellated backs… she read until she felt sick. She couldn’t finish the article because she had to eat her breakfast and go to work. The bus was full. Claudia saw the people on it: the usual faces.

However, there was something different and, for some reason, she couldn’t tell what that was. Then she saw them: two beautiful, big, brown eyes staring at her from the back of the bus. There was something strange in those eyes, something lovely, beautiful, and at the same time so dangerous that she felt intrigued.

“Missy, are you stupid or something? Move! You are on my way” grumbled an old lady. Claudia barely listened to her and approached to the guy with beautiful eyes. She saw that the man was reading the same newspaper she had read that morning.

“It’s a horrible article, don’t you think?” Said Claudia pointing at the title. “Yes, it’s too dramatic, the author never mentioned the motivation of the so called killer…” and he explained a series of ideas that could lead a person to kill, she was so intrigued by his reasons that decided not going to work and kept on talking with him. “… There are people whose lives are lonely, dramatic, depressed, they think about dying, but they don’t have the courage to kill themselves. A very good person can do it for them, it’s the best favor someone can do” “But why torture them?” “Torture can be healing, it purifies the soul”.

After nearly 5 hours of being talking with him, she felt surprisingly convinced by his reasons. By the time he told her that he was the author of the crime she had read about, she wasn’t even surprised. They saw each other every single day; eventually, she was fired, and she didn’t care, all she wanted was to talk with her mysterious man.

After a few months something very unexpected happened: she helped her beloved man to kill a person, it felt logical, at this point she believed everything he said. She helped him to clean the scene, they cleaned the blood, erased fingerprints.

They went outside the city and started a fire. They took the personal documents of the victim’s body and Claudia wrote his name and other personal information in a special notebook (dedicated to “saved” people). This victim was the first of many. After this, they burnt the body; then they threw the documents into the fire. Now no one would ever know their secret.



My grade: 15