Abe the Storyteller

Of course, it would have to be his idea; he liked knowing what others could only guess at. Abraham was like that; he liked to play games.

Just the other day, he asked Mary Miller over; such a plain, dowdy and simple creature with mud-brown hair and cloud-grey eyes. Recently turned thirty and still a spinster.

I was particularly annoyed with Abe showing Mary our vegetable patch like that, talking about it as though it had won first prize at the county fair. There weren’t many vegetables to show, just rows of shoots pushing their leafy heads through the recently ploughed earth.

Of course I knew the reason for the slow growth of our vegetable patch. (Thankfully Abe kept this little nugget of knowledge to himself.)

I studied Mary Miller’s expression from the kitchen window; she wasn’t sure what Abe was showing her. Bless her little cotton socks. She nodded politely and listened to the great storyteller feeding her lie upon lie upon lie.

After she left, Abe came inside and poured himself a glass of cold lemonade.

‘So, what did you say to her?’

He didn’t look at me. Instead he took a long gulp of lemonade and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

‘Nothing important Lizzie, so there’s no need to worry.’

Abe the Storyteller

But that’s exactly it, I do worry. I worry a lot. I worry about what might be uncovered and whether outsiders will buy our story. We have to ensure our alibis are watertight but Abe keeps adding bits in and taking other bits out. Sometimes I really do question his storytelling.

He says it’s good to be kept on your toes. It stops you from becoming complacent. As if I could be complacent living with a guy like him?

At first I thought his plan was just a one-off fantasy; you hear about these cases, they’re after the thrill, the rush of pure adrenaline in their veins, to know what it’s like to kill.

But this isn’t the case with Abe; Abe with his polished egg-like head and those deep minstrel brown eyes, unseeing and soulless. Now we have to think of other ways to dispose of the evidence – the vegetable patch cannot cope with the growing amounts of corpses which keep piling up.

All it takes is for a suspicious pair of eyes (I’m thinking of Mary Miller here) to spot something that isn’t quite right, and start rooting around and then we’ve had it.

We stand side by side, Abe wielding his pitchfork like a sceptre, waiting for the cameraman to focus his lens. I focus on each individual prong – how rusty they look up close, how sharp they really are. The cameraman holds up his hand, counting down. I steal a sideways glance at Abe and ask him to forgive me before I plunge the knife deep in his side.

Now he knows how sharp such tools can be.