The Seven Deadly Sins: An Anthology

By Harvardwood Press

Seven Deadly Sins brings together the dark reflections of 15 international writers on the hidden thoughts and desires that bedevil everyone at some time. It's luscious and lusty and you know you want to...

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483584430

Book preview

Morrison.

INTRODUCTION

Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth. Where would literature and storytelling be without these capital vices? We may all want the ending to be happy and the conflicts in the story to be worked out, but who wants to sit through any kind of tale which is full of nothing but virtue and wholesomeness?

Vices in stories have an irresistible charge to them. How else to explain the massive audiences for crime, thrillers and police procedurals in our culture?

It was ever thus, apparently, and we are in good company.

Dante arranged his Divine Comedy according to the seven deadly sins. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale, the final tale in his Canterbury Tales brings together the seven deadly sins using common images and ideas in a blistering sermon. The painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder did a celebrated series of prints around the theme, showing figures distorted and degenerated by sin. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins was a fierce satire on capitalism and the effect of the vices employed in the service of capitalism.

When we first put out the call for submissions for this anthology, I was expecting lust and greed to dominate and I was not disappointed. Many of these vices are of course bedfellows and very few of them travel alone. Death as the result of giving full thrust to these vices has been very pleasurably explored by several of our contributors. Appetite and excess are here too, as of course is the source of most joy and conflict, family.

This is the first of several anthologies Harvardwood Publishing is planning to bring out and we thank you for coming along for the ride.

Patricia Danaher, 2016

Director, Harvardwood Publishing

Couples Therapy

By Jonathan E. Demson

As I gazed at my wife sleeping next to me, her sleek, athletic silhouette heaving gently with each soft breath in the early morning sun, I cast my mind back over the past year and wondered when, exactly, had I decided to murder her? Was it her smug reaction when I was laid off, as if losing my job was a foregone conclusion given my general incompetence? Was it the studied air of disgust with which she now reacted to virtually any failing on my part, no matter how minor? Or her showy, grunting efforts to avert her eyes from even a fleeting glimpse of my naked body? No doubt, these had all contributed to the transformation of vague homicidal fantasies into a concrete plan.

But if there was a single moment, a turning point that cemented the necessity of her mortal departure in my mind, it was at my cousin Ernie’s Thanksgiving dinner a few months earlier. Ernie and I had hated each other with unveiled contempt since childhood, and he delighted in publicly humiliating me at every opportunity. So it was no surprise when, after dinner, the rhubarb pie and coffee were accompanied by a slowly unfolding line of attack, ingeniously designed to reveal to everyone at the table that his cousin was not only a fool, but one whom Ernie could torment at will for after-dinner sport. Ernie was soon joined in his attack by his nefarious crony, Harvey, who quickly sensed that the hunt was on and I was the prey. Harvey was a complete phony with a penchant for endless self-promotion, but these shortcomings were for some reason not apparent to women like my wife, who found him irresistibly charming. My efforts to avoid him were invariably thwarted by my wife, who frequently embarrassed herself by her absurd attempts to impress him at every social occasion.

Ernie and Harvey were soon engaged in a well-choreographed bullfight in which I was the doomed animal. Ernie, playing picador, leaned far back in his chair, eyes glinting and face flush with drunken excitement as he alternately leered condescendingly at me and grinned at everyone else. With each little jab he deftly pierced my defenses, each time drawing a few more drops of blood until I was staggering from the humiliation. But it was Harvey who played matador, delivering the final sword thrust, the sudden brutal barb that dissolved the entire dinner table into a hideous deluge of cackling laughter. As if in a strange dream, my eyes darted compulsively from one face to the next across the table as they bobbed and nodded with admiration at my tormentors, only occasionally glancing at me as if to confirm that such a pathetic character could actually be real. The only one not laughing was old Mrs. Ronson at the far end of the table, her gaze fixed on me with a faint smile of pity, a sight yet more unbearable than all the rest.

The laughter around the table was deep and rich and cruel. Not the polite chuckling of dinner guests indulging their host’s amusing anecdote, nor the benign forced laughter at the children’s after-dinner skit. This was unbridled mirth, a convulsive, euphoric celebration of the human sacrifice served up by their clever host and his brilliant accomplice. In the midst of my ordeal, I caught sight of my wife across the table from me, her teeth flashing in the candlelight as she eagerly joined the crowd with that irrepressible giggle that I knew to be her expression of pure delight. Catching Harvey’s eye, she winked at him. Congratulations. It was the most delicious and enticing wink imaginable.

That wink, as I now reflected, would cost her her life.

For a few days after Thanksgiving, she had been somewhat subdued, sensing perhaps that I had endured something too awful even for one she so despised, and perhaps even feeling some faint sense of guilt over her own complicity in the affair. For my part, I wandered through the next few days in a fog, too dazed even to contemplate acts of revenge. Flashbacks from the Thanksgiving dinner set upon me relentlessly, day and night, like the piercing chirp of a malfunctioning smoke alarm.

But it was the desire for revenge that eventually lifted me out of my stupor and converted these random bursts of horror into the focused energy necessary to complex scheming. There would be several people to repay, of course, but I was not so foolish as to attempt more than one murder at a time. Indeed, I realized the dispatching of my enemies would have to be spaced out over a period of years in order not to draw suspicion upon myself. But knowing that none of them would die naturally, and that I would decide when and how each life would end, helped me to be patient. In any event, the memory of that salacious wink placed my wife firmly at the top of the list.

My assessment of a project like getting away with murder was that it would likely fall somewhere between the impossible task depicted in serious literature and ‘film’ and the relatively easy task depicted in cheap fiction and ‘the movies.’ My basic premise was that, if I could dispose of the body, no one could pin a murder on me. I was familiar with the stories of the inexperienced killer breaking down under questioning by the crafty detective, but I doubted that I would be so easily outwitted. The key would be to hide as little as possible, to admit everything to a point, and, far from trying to be clever, to allow myself to become flustered if ever I felt cornered. My very lack of polish would eventually convince even the most suspicious investigator that I had nothing to do with my wife’s disappearance. In any event, with a little planning, I doubted that I would even be suspected of foul play. After all, the first data point in a pattern is not yet a pattern. My first wife was alive and well and teaching German in Cincinnati.

The work of planning my wife’s execution was, of course, quite complicated, but I was glad after so many years of frustration and emptiness to finally have a project into which I could pour all of my energy and enthusiasm. There were two main challenges. First, it was vitally important that my wife’s death not be quick, but rather one that involved prolonged anguish and suffering. Otherwise, even her mortal demise might not undo all of the pain and humiliation I had suffered at her hands over the years of our marriage. I knew that there would need to be a minimum period of horror-stricken pleading and weeping on her part in order for me to feel that my own years of suffering had been satisfactorily purged. Second, her body would have to disappear in such a way that no amount of DNA testing would ever find any trace of it. The optimal solution would be one that addressed both requirements in one fell swoop.

I became deeply involved in my research, studying the literature and drama of murder with newfound appreciation for realism and disgust for the purely fanciful. Although Dr. Moriarty had devised many satisfying methods of dispatching his arch nemesis, none of these addressed the problem of disposing of Holmes’s body. And while highly trained killers had over the years devised any number of foolproof ways of disposing of their victims’ corpses—from vats of acid to various tricks involving the meat industry—I quickly dismissed all of these as well beyond my novice capabilities.

Having narrowed down my options to a few alternatives, I ultimately settled upon the municipal zoo, which presented a solution both elegant and highly entertaining. By somehow placing my wife within the enclosure of some vicious and hungry wild animal, I would be able to watch her destruction with all the pomp and ceremony of the ancient Roman Circus, while at the same time ensuring that nothing of her would remain. I began to visit the zoo at every opportunity. While I realized that I risked becoming recognizable to the employees, I deemed that risk small in comparison with the need to familiarize myself with the site of my wife’s last moments.

For her part, my wife paid little attention to my comings and goings and seemed not the least bit interested in knowing where I had been all day despite the fact that I had no job. In fact, if anything, our daily separations seemed to improve our relationship for the time being, and we entered a period of mutual disinterest that was a welcome respite from the relentless warfare of recent years. I must admit that, in my efforts to avoid arousing my wife’s curiosity, I became in subtle ways a more considerate husband. For her part, my wife was largely refraining from her usual invidious behavior toward me, a shift I decided to welcome without questioning its motivations.

It was not long before I began to appreciate the enormous advantages of my choice. The zoo was understaffed and poorly managed, the product of round after round of municipal funding cuts. The animal enclosures were rickety and in desperate need of repair, and supervision of visitors was appallingly lax. The animals themselves seemed strangely aware of these deficiencies and paced around in their cages as if waiting for their chance to escape.

As I