Creative Process (Part 3)
Murder is never an easy thing to describe. Often when humans kill another human we attribute motives to them, implicitly admitting that to a certain extent we can relate to their actions. When humans kill and animal though, it seems harder to understand. Especially when the human in question is a placid and well-liked private-school boy with a passion for aesthetics.
Hudson was not a sociopath. Nor was he so caught up in his vision that he could not separate it from reality. It was simply one of those things that you do, with the knowledge that its a bad idea, but somehow you don’t fully grock this until you’ve done it. Usually these things are more along the lines pulling someone’s seat out as they try to sit so they fall on their tail-bone, or punching the wall. In these instances a “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking” usually suffices.
Hudson’s kindergarten best-friend Murley had told him that worms had five hearts, so you could cut them up and they would still live. The two of them had decided to conduct an experiment to verify this. They didn’t have a knife or scissors, so they used bark and sticks, producing a science experiment that looked like the worm-version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (another classic Hudson had watched on the old Blue-Ray machine).
What Hudson did now was something closer to that.
He pinched Pocket’s mouth shut to stop the incessant yapping, and began posing him in various positions, trying envision how this creature could become his masterpiece, occasionally glancing in the bathroom mirror for an alternative perspective and to see what he looked like while he worked. The pooch scrambled a bit, but a five pound dog does not provide much resistance. He tried the classic dog sitting, dog lying down, dog shaking, and then went with the more exotic dog looking back over his shoulder. When Hudson snapped his head a little to far to the right, or failed to stop pinching his muzzle, it was not exactly a mistake. There was some noise in the back of the boy’s brain telling him that this was Not Okay, but there were many other noises telling him to try a different angle, to keep the dog from squirming too much, to stop the yapping, and so on. He wasn’t sure whether it was from the snap he heard when going for a more extreme over-the-shoulder angle or from holding his muzzle closed, but Pocket stopped scrambling so much. Or at all. This certainly made Hudson’s work easier. He realized he would have to explain this to the neighbors later, but for now he might as well continue with his project.
