Busy Body

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Busy Body

By Plot Roach

What was left of nosey woman lay in a lump on Anita’s kitchen floor. Anita had been waging a war with this woman for nearly a month, and now it was finally at an end. Tough not in the way that I had wanted, Anita thought, looking at the corpse. Anita was new to the apartment complex, and the woman had been the neighborhood gossip. Anita liked her life private, and did not want her business spread around the complex like so much fertilizer.

So when the woman had stopped to feed her the latest gossip, Anita cut her off, saying that she did not believe in talking about people behind their backs. That had been the first nail in her coffin, as the woman now began to gossip about Anita. Not that she knew anything about the new tenant. But she made up stories and circulated them like chain letters. And of course, no one would believe Anita’s side of the stories, being new and all.

Then the woman insisted that Anita volunteer to help her, either asking for help lugging groceries up the flight of stairs to her apartment, or else ’borrowing’ items that she had no intention of returning. Anita, trying to turn the other cheek and foster a sense of goodwill in the complex to make up for the stories the woman had told about her, tried her best to appease the woman. She even smiled weakly when the woman’s two dogs, a hideous crossbreed of Pit-bull and Shar-pei that not even blind man could love, snarled at her as she carried the woman’s groceries into her home.

“I need to borrow two hundred dollars. Be a dear and get it for me, would you?” the woman asked one evening as she walked her freakish mistakes of nature she called dogs out on the front lawn of the complex. Anita eyed the dogs, knowing that the woman never bothered to clean up after them.

“Excuse me?” Anita asked, not sure if she heard the woman right.

“I need the money. And I’m sure you’ll be grateful to give it to me. I mean, I’ve done so much for you, and all…”

“YOU have done so much for me?!” Anita balked. “I’ve done nothing but good things for you, and all you have done in return is spread rumors about me to make yourself look good. You can piss off, lady! This gravy train is gone.” Anita slammed the apartment gate closed behind her and headed back to her apartment. Not ten minutes in its solitude, there was a knock on the door.

It was the dog woman.

“What in the Hell do you want now?” Anita asked.

The woman pushed her way into Anita’s apartment and pushed her onto the ground. “Now you’re going to give me three hundred dollars, or I’ll tell the police that your evil little dog did this.” she said, brandishing a bitten arm at Anita. It was red and swollen. And though the bite marks had to have been from one of her own dogs, she knew that animal control would seize her beloved Kiwi, a fifteen year old golden retriever. And he would be euthanized before she could blink an eye. After the ice in her veins seized her heart, the coldness spread to her brain. It was a wonderful numbing feeling, and just what she needed for the situation at hand.

“I keep my emergency money in a tin in the kitchen.” she said, closing the door behind the woman.

“I knew that you’d see things my way-”

Anita cut off the woman, quite literally, in mid sentence. She had grabbed a large kitchen knife from the sink, grabbed a snatch of the woman’s hair and pulled her head back as she carved the front of the woman’s neck into a large red smile. She let the dog woman fall to the floor to pump out the rest of her life onto the cold pitted linoleum. When the woman stopped twitching, Anita checked to make sure that the door was locked. It’s no use to get caught in the middle of cleanup, she thought. She returned the knife to the kitchen sink and grabbed a handful of dark bed sheets. Anita rolled the woman onto one of these sheets in order to drag her to the bathroom without leaving a trail behind her.

Once in the bathroom, she pushed and pulled the woman into the bathtub, making sure to plug the drain so that the blood would not flow down the pipe, congeal and plug it up. Anita stripped down into her underwear and grabbed a handful of knives, scissors and a Black & Decker handsaw so that she could begin to work on the corpse.

Goodbye, dog lady, she thought. I never did know you real name. She used the power saw to chew through the thicker parts of the woman, and used the heavy scissors to cut through tough muscles the knives were too blunt for. She separated the woman into small sections and placed them into heavy garbage bags. Once done, she used a cup to transfer the blood from the bathtub to the toilet, repeatedly flushing to get rid of the red liquid and small scraps of flesh that had fallen away during the butchering process.

Now what am I going to do with you? Anita asked herself. If I dump her in a trash bin, even in another city, chances are I will have forgotten some small scrap of something that will tie my DNA to her body. I can’t burn her, there’s not a big enough barbeque pit here. She set the parts of her nosey neighbor into her deep freezer until she could think up a way to finally be rid of the woman.

She showered, bagged up the bloody clothes and bed sheets to dispose of later, and was about to fix herself dinner when there was a knock at the door. Not again, she thought. I just don’t have enough room in my freezer for TWO bodies today.

Another neighbor was waiting for her to open the door. Did he see her come in here? She asked herself. Does he suspect something? Her heart pounded as she opened the door. She tried to put on her best I’m-a-normal-person-and-not-a-killer smile. “Yes?” she asked.

“I was wondering if anybody let you in on the summer potluck get-together yet?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well Charlene was supposed to tell you. Didn’t she say anything about it yet?”

“Charlene?”

“You know, the lady with the two dogs upstairs.”

“The pit-bull things?”

“Yeah, that’s her. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you though. Since she’s so good at telling everything else here.”

“I noticed the gossip streak.” Anita said, smiling.

“Oh, don’t let that get to you.” the neighbor said. “Everybody knows that she’s full of crap.”

Blood, tendons and a huge amount of fat, actually, Anita thought. She smiled, took the flyer from the neighbor and told him that she would be glad to participate. Provided I’m not in jail, she thought. She skimmed the flyer. It looked like it would involve a good number of people. That’s going to be a lot of food, she thought. She winced at the price of the ingredients to feed so many people. And then the thought crossed her mind: she would let Charlene help her with the expense.

A week later the streets were closed off, the picnic tables were set out and people came from each part of the apartment complex with plates, bowls and trenches of food. Anita asked for help from a few of the neighbors to trundle out the feast that she had prepared.

There was rump roast, marinated ribs for the barbeque, homemade sausage and lean hamburgers.

“It’s a pity Charlene isn’t here to see all this.”

“Whatever happened to her, do you think?” Anita asked.

“She was always a bit flighty, if you ask me.” said another neighbor. “The landlord keeps feeding her dogs, but he says that he’s going to send them to the pound soon if she doesn’t show up in a day or so. He’ll probably toss her stuff out too. She’s been behind in her rent for nearly three months now. Not that any of us will really miss her, though.”

Anita smiled and said nothing, taking a big bite out of the fruit salad on her plate.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything off the grill?” a neighbor asked.

“No.” Anita said. “I’ve decided to become a vegetarian and I thought that I would use up all the meat in my freezer at once rather than letting it go bad.”

“It’s a shame Charlene isn’t here to enjoy all of this.” one of her neighbors said. “She just loved homemade food like this”, the man said, biting into one of the ribs.

“Oh, I’m sure she’s here in spirit.” Anita said, taking another bite off of her plate.