Bdelygmia (del-ig’-mi-a): Expressing hatred and abhorrence of a person, word, or deed.
“Hatred is the feeing I feel inside every time I look in your hollow eyes. ‘You cheated. You lied. You told me you loved me.’ What can I do but go ahead and dump you?“ I was practicing my break-up speech with Penny, my once true love.
Penny was worse than “Runaround Sue” my previous romantic blunder—Sue had literally run around with every guy in town. It took her six months to make the rounds, all the while going steady with me. She called me her “Little Teddy Bear” while all the while in reality I was her “Little Sucker Fish.” I finally gave her the boot when she cheated on me with my father. I squealed on Dad to Mom and set a trap for her. I bled out the brakes of her Ford Pinto. She didn’t even get out of the driveway when she had to stop and go back inside to retrieve her purse. When she went to stop and the brakes failed, she pulled the emergency brake and stopped right there. No harm done.
So, failing to kill her, I gave her my first break-up speech ever (she was my first girlfriend). I ended it with a poem: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I hate your guts, and I hate you too!” She told me to go fu*k myself and jumped in Mack Pleegy’s Merc. She yelled out the window, “We’re goin’ down by the river to do it. Why don’t you come down and watch us, loser butt?”
That was a bad breakup. She cared even less than I thought she did.
Now, I was thinking that my break-up with Penny had to be beyond mere words. I threw my speech away and went down to Big Al’s “Guns and Ammo” to possibly buy something to shoot Penny with. Everything was too expensive. I couldn’t even afford the single action, single shot, .22 caliber Ptarmigan Plinker.
I needed a cheap and easy way to wipe Penny off the face of the earth. God, did I hate her!
I settled on drowning her. It was early winter and the ice on Miller’s Pond was barely frozen over. I would take her there on the pretext of ice skating, push her out on the thin ice, and revel in her screams for help as she broke through and drowned.
I pushed her out onto the ice. She went about six inches and fell through. I had pushed hard so she had a lot of forward momentum. She fell forward and a slammed face down on the ice and broke through.
She stood up and faced me and started accusing me of attempted murder. She was right. I was screwed, so I picked up a big rock and hit over the head with it. The rock wasn’t big enough. It only made her bleed from her forehead. She started yelling for help. Now, some people came coming from the adjacent jogging trail. I tried to run away, but they caught me.
I was convicted of attempted murder. I’m currently on house arrest. I had a great lawyer who vividly displayed what Penny had down to me that justified my attempt to murder her.
I have a job with Amazon now, keeping track of packages on the internet. I have a new girlfriend, Lorilai. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have just given the speech.
