Ismary's Catch

Ismary Bevolliri spends her life murdering rapist, murders and child molesters. Instead of a award, she's given the worst punishment possible.

     If you ever opened a book that reviled the truth, it caught you and turned you into someone else. It’s like if you’re in a haunted house. You are walking around when you come to a door. It’s an eerie door. You think you hear a noise or a scream. It’s quiet, you almost here pyshco music. Your heart is beating a million beats a minute. You hear your conscience say no, no, no damn it do you hear me? Don’t open the door. Your hand starts to tremble as you start to reach for the knob. You start to breath in wild, uneven breaths as you reach for the door knob. The tips of your fingers are touching it now, they are shaking uncontrollably. Your mind screams. You try to take your hand away but you can’t. Slowly, minutes pass by as you turn the knob as slow as you can. You’ve turned the knob all the way, and the door flees open. You see what’s behind that door. Words and screams and life and death and all sorts of emotion run to you. Words are suffocating you. Screams rumble out your mouth. Life pierces you in the face. Death lays undisturbed.

       Or like when you are having a monthly sleepover with your friends. You all made a fort and are lying down, giggling and telling you who you like. Your friend starts to tell you her deepest secret. The secret is not ordinary. She tells you she killed a man or something that everytime you see her wave in the hall, or smile at you, you think of what she done. You swallow and wave back. But now that secret has ruined your friendship. You lay in your bed that night thinking. Wondering how you should deal with this. You know you can never tell anyone that her little smile haunts you like a ghost in the back of your mind. You lay there scared. You’ve went to the movies with her and did this and that and with her. She knows where you live. And you know what she can do. Darkness and fear swallow you and you wish you never, ever, knew her little secret. Why did you beg her and ask her over and over again? But now you know. The truth defiantly hurts.

     Maybe even like me, if you’re sitting in a room alone. About to open a document that will explain the truth. You don’t know that after you read it rampage will take over you and you will lose your mind and do something you wish you hadn’t. After that, you want to never have opened that stupid paper. I’d live with not knowing what happened to my parents. It didn’t matter. I’ve survived years without them and could survive more.

      But all of this comes down to one thing. You wish you didn’t know what was behind that door or your best friend’s secret or what actually happened to your parents. But curiosity is a weird thing. It killed people, saved people’s life, and completely destroy them. Curiosity is like sleeping pills. If you take too much, you’ll have an overdose and eventually die. But, however, if you take just as many as you need, you’ll go to sleep without hurting yourself and sleeping nicely and peacefully. And if you don’t take any pills, (but you need them) and you end up getting twenty three minutes of sleep that night, it hurts you when you fall asleep at work and get demoted.

    You see, when I was six years old, my parents were murdered. I returned home from school, a regular day when I noticed that my Mom wasn’t in the kitchen. I walked up the stairs, turned the corner into her and my father’s room. I opened the door silently, and saw something that haunts me like a bad best friends secret.

      My mom was lying next to my father, both on the ground. Blood sheathed over them. A knife incision into my father’s chest, his heart laying halfway out. I shrudded then observed my mom. She was naked under a bloody quilt. There were a lot of bruises on her. Her neck was slit open.

      The one thing I always still think about today is that even though I know now is that mom was raped then killed, and Father was murdered, is that they were still holding hands. It was beautiful.

     The death of my forever young parents was exceeded by the beauty of my sister’s death. I was thirteen at the time. You see, me and my sister never really got along. I was always making straight A’s, winning contests and far more popular. Maria on the other hand, she was so older than me there were things I didn’t understand at the time of that innocence. For instance, we used to live with a foster parent named Gloria. Gloria wasn’t made to be a mother, she didn’t know how to say no or yes but only both at the same time. I was nice to Gloria for the most part; she tried to be a mother unlike all the money grabbing foster parents we had. Maria, however, had struggles with Gloria. It started with the night the police brought her home, Gloria, Maria and the police screamed at each other for hours. Then, at last it was decided, my sister was sent to a mental institution. Mental institutions aren’t like how they are today, they were disgusting buildings full with naked children and guards who raped the females. That’s where my sister was murdered; her death was youthful and beautiful. The rope that lay around her neck made her blue eyes shine like the ocean.

    “Okay Misses Ismary, we have your folder. Now give us something in return.” The female detective says as she walks in, throwing a manila envelope on the table in front of me. She wears a pant suit, and with mother curves she fills it out in an unappealing way. The male detective behind her wears a white button up shirt with a dark crimson tie.

    “You’re tie is the color of blood. How interesting, I have seen an extreme amount of shades of blood, and my mother’s was dark red like that. My father’s was a more dense red, but still light. My sister had almost a tint of orange in it, still young from beating in her heart.”

   The male detective slams his fist on to the table, not startling me but the female detective slightly flinches. “So you admit you’ve killed before?”

   “Please, I was only a child when they passed. I’ve never killed a soul, not worth killing anyways. Do you know what a hero is? In Greek tragedies, It’s a royal or very wealthy protagonist. They didn’t believe the poor can suffer odd isn’t it? Definatley ironic, since the poor defiantly suffer the most. Even in modern culture, each hero goes through a tragic event to become that hero. Spiderman, Harry Potter, any hero in literature.”

    The woman detective c***s her head. “So you consider yourself a hero?”

    “I take child molesters and rapist off the streets. I don’t call myself a criminal. You might think I am a criminal, but I’m just doing your job. You’re jealous you’re not like me.”

     The male detective stands up and throws a chair clear across the interrogation room. It shatters the window and the female detective jumps in her seat. I smile, not even passing a blink.

     “So you think murdering innocent people is better than putting serial killers like you away?” He yells at me, his anger is quite absurd for our current predicament.  

     “You got me what I wanted.” I say, touching the manila folder that tells me who murdered my parents, why and how they did. They murdered my sister, taking her away from the only people who loved her. He murdered me; the death penalty is a wanted sign for me. “So I’ll give you what you want.  My name is Ismary Bevolliri, I murdered thirty men in cold blood. I shot them each, assassination style for killing the children, dreams, and souls they murdered. I confess souly.”

   The male cop approaches me and lifts me up, cuffing my hands. I scream and yell for him to stop, he lets go and my hands shake as they reach for the folder. It’s spectacular how the meaning of my life is about to be revealed while I just gave mine away to the government. There’s only one thing I’ve ever really wanted to know, how someone could murder my parents like that. It visits me every night in my dream. It’s why I killed my first victim. He was busy, dragging a dead body to a ditch when I saw him. I saw my father’s face, my mother blood my sisters neck. From then on, a child molester was my sister’s foster father who molested her after he welcomed us in his home. A rapist was my mother’s rapist. A murder killed all of them, they paid as well.

    My pale fingertips reach the folder and I flip it open. There, against the cream of manila sat today’s newspaper advertisements. My eyes gaze up to the male detective in rage.

    He smiles and bellows out a fat laugh. “You were really, that naive to think I’d actually give something to a murderer?”

     If you ever opened a book that reviled the truth, it caught you and turned you into someone else.

Reviews

[LOfCharlemagne]

Very intriguing and a great story! Just a few tips i may provide: The introduction in my opinion is way too long. It looses the intrest of the reader kind of easy. What I suggest is cutting down a lot of the phrases except for the ones that portray the main message you want to assert. I love your plot, very fascinating. It almost reminds me of what I am writing in a weird way. Great alludes to Greek literature! It almost certainly reminds me of "Antigone" in a way when you bring up how Greek Literature defined a hero. Overall it is an excellent read, and i thoroughly enjoyed reading it from start to end(even though i honestly do suggest trimming up the introduction a bit, but that really is just a simple fix.)

[Syrinx]

Thank you!

[KillerWithWords]

This story certainly is interesting. I really like the retrospective narration, it allows a lot of room for adding in your character's thoughts. You might want to begin with the current scene to bring your reader into the story.
I enjoyed reading it. Your character certainly is developed.

[Caradoc]

This is a very interesting piece. It reminds me of the television show, Dexter, based off of the book series about the same killer. You've probably heard of him, the serial killer killer. Your protagonist, Ismary reminds me a lot of Dexter. Her name is also unique, one I have never heard before, so you get props for that. I also enjoyed but at the same time hated the twist at the end. All throughout the story, I sympathized with Ismary. After the misery she went through, everything in her life turning to crap, I felt that her actions in response to that were justified. And I wanted her to get the peace, the understanding she desperately desired.

So, you did a good job with this piece, grabbing my attention, hook, line and sinker. The story is great. I also love the use of second person point of view as a means to engage the reader during the first part. The narrator speaks directly to the reader, describing situations to them. It really draws one into the story, makes them wonder about what's really going on. However, where you start to fall short, is in certain places where grammar is a bit off and some of your phrases come out strange. I'll see if I can point out the worst offenders for you. However, be sure to go back through, reading each line out loud. What we write often sounds different when spoken aloud as opposed to just in our head.

Paragraph 1.) First sentence, the word "reviled", based on context seems like it should be "revealed". That sentence is also the opener and closer of the tale. It packs a punch. It should stand alone, not part of any paragraph. Third sentence, you could possibly change "walking around" to exploring. Maybe make mention that "you", the reader, is all alone in this haunted house. Fourth sentence, don't tell me it's an eerie door, show me it's an eerie door. Describe what about it makes it eerie, but don't actually come out and say it. For the paragraph as a whole, and in the second paragraph as well, tone down the use of the word "you". Yes it's second person and you want to make sure the reader still knows that, but saying you every few sentences gets monotonous and grating, detracting from the reader's immersion in the story. Ditto for the word "knob". As others have said, trim down the intro a bit. You went a little overboard, from building nice suspense to leaving the reader going, "how long is it gonna take to open this door?" The sentence where the door is finally opened, "flees" isn't the word you want. The door didn't run away. You want "flies".

Paragraph 2.) Second sentence, it should be something along the lines of "and telling each other who you like." You could also remove the "you made a fort and are lying down" and just say "lying down and giggling in a fort". It's all about order of words and how it sounds when you say it aloud. The part about laying in bed at night, thinking about the secret, would sound better if you changed it up to indicate that it's every night, not just one. Makes it seem more grandiose. "Gone" to the movies instead of "went". Another common mistake I see people make all the time, which you make in this story several times as well as in the book you're working on, "defiantly" should be "definitely".

Paragraph 4.) Sentence four, if you change the tense in a few of the words and switch things up a bit, it sounds better, is more grammatically correct, and makes more sense. So it would look like this; "It's killed people, saved the lives of some, and completely destroyed others." The rest of the paragraph is gravy.

Paragraph 5.) Change it to, "my parents bedroom". For added effect you could say, "that haunts me more than a bad best friend's secret." Makes it worse.

Paragraph 6.) You should probably rewrite it. It works for now, but the phrasing is very awkward. You would also do well to describe how they were laying. This memory is burned into Ismary's mind. She would remember and be able to describe it with great detail, don't you think? Also, you misspelled the word "shuddered". After doing that, include part of the first sentence of the next paragraph at the end in an altered form, specifically, "But, there is one thing I still think about to this day." It sets the stage for how Ismary views the scene of their death, for it to be a single sentence describing how, even though her mother was raped before both she and the father were killed, in death, they were holding hands. It's a very important aspect of the story, a major insight into Ismary's thoughts and emotions. It should stand alone.

Whew, this is a very long comment. I might have to stop soon.

Another thing I noticed. It has nothing to do with the story or SPAG, but it's kind of glaring just the same. After the word "blood" in paragraph 6, the font gets lighter. At first I thought it was my monitor but now I am convinced it's some odd formatting you either did accidentally, or that writer'scafe has imposed on this piece for some strange reason. I'm not sure how you can fix it. This strange occurrence ends just before the last line in the story.

The rest has more grammar mistakes and a few mistaken words, such as using "you're" instead of "your" when Ismary tells the detective his tie is the color of blood. There aren't that many though, so a quick read through should be enough to spot them.

Overall, this is a good story. The content is superb, gets the reader involved and thinking. It makes them question themselves and identify with the protagonist, a serial killer. What needs work is your phrasing and SPAG. With a good clean edit, I would gladly purchase this in a bookstore as a short story in an anthology of crime stories.

Keep up the good work and strive to improve your grammar. Presentation is half the battle of writing a story. No matter how original, how well conceived a story is, if the presentation is lacking, the message and the enjoyment of the content, is diminished or lost entirely.

-Caradoc

[Marble Mountain]

A little choppy in places, but I like the main idea. You captured the emotions perfectly so that instead of thinking of the main character as a criminal (which the law wants us to do), I thought of her as a hero.