By KB Jensen
In a Serial Killer’s Garden
The problem with dissolving a body in acid is that it’s bad for the environment, Rachel thought as she read the news that day. She wrinkled her nose in disgust at the latest story about a murderer who did just that. Talk about ecologically irresponsible. It was much better to burn the bodies and use the ash in her garden. Rachel had a keen interest in other murderers and read about their methods, carefully to avoid the mistakes that got them caught.
Victim number one was pushing daisies. Rachel looked out her window and remembered her old landlady and the circular glasses that used to slip down her nose. She kept them as a souvenir on the windowsill. The last trace of the woman. Now Rachel lived rent-free.
This house was her house. The garden was her garden. The daisies were hers. She sighed contently and took a slow slurp of her hot coffee. Her flower garden was the perfect resting place, tranquil. Her kiln out back was eight feet long and could get to 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Her nearest neighbors were thirteen miles away. There were advantages to country living. Rachel enjoyed baking bread and pies, and leaving them on the wide windowsill, cooling next to the glasses.
Her latest victim, Rick, was in the basement, tied up and knocked unconscious. She’d tend to him at nightfall. Right now, was time to tend to the flowers.
Different clusters of flowers, each representing a victim swayed in streaks of color across the yard.
Roses for Roy
Sweet peas for Patrick
Daisies for Delilah
Tulips for Todd
Fire lilies for Linda
Black-eyed Susans for Susan
Geraniums for George
Snapdragons for Samantha
Hydrangeas for Henry
Roy was an ex-boyfriend who made the mistake of calling Rachel a giant freak and telling her no one else would ever love a woman as large or ugly as she was. Rachel was over six feet and outweighed him by forty pounds. Delilah was the landlady, of course. Other than that, she had no true personal connections with her victims.
Rachel worked for streets and sanitation, collecting recycling. Patrick, Linda, George, Samantha and Henry, had all mixed their recyclables. Todd and Susan, they didn’t recycle at all, dumping their plastic milk containers and old papers directly into the trash. Rick had thrown out a perfectly good couch on a rainy day.
Rachel tossed her coffee grounds into the compost pile. She pulled her long blond hair into a ponytail, put on her muddy gardening gloves and grabbed the garden hoe outside the back door.
The soil around the roses was rich, and the fight against weeds was always a battle. Something about Roy and his ashes brought out both the beauty and ugliness in the world. Rachel pulled out the roots, abandoning the gloves, so she could feel them with her fingers, pulling them up without snapping them in half with remnants in the ground. A thistle had popped up in Patrick’s section, one of the most stubborn weeds. She put the gloves back on and started to dig with her shovel. Removed most of it. She didn’t own any pesticides, but sprayed the roots with white vinegar. When she got to the daisies, a strange red bug caught her eye. She got down to the ground and was watching its antennae twitch, trying to identify whether it was friend or foe to the plants, when the hoe slammed down on her head. “What the hell?” she yelled.
“Ahh, Rick,” she mumbled.
“Who are you and how do you know my name and what are you trying to do to me?” Rick’s wrists were bloody from where the ties had cut into his skin.
“How did you get out of the basement?” she asked.
He hit her with the hoe again, and she saw flashes of color behind her eyes. Warm, sticky blood ran down her face. She wiped it from her mouth.
“Your name, it’s on your statement.” She gasped. “Why on Earth did you put a perfectly good couch out on the street in the rain?”
“Bedbugs.” He hit her again. “Give me your phone.”
“I’m not a fan of most bugs either.” She looked back down at the red bug. “Sorry I misjudged you,” she said. She stumbled to her feet. “I don’t have a phone.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Rick said. He went to hit her again, but this time, Rachel grabbed the handle of the hoe with all the force she could muster, just under the metal.
“The nice thing about working for the department of streets and sanitation is that it makes you strong,” Rachel said, smiling. She twisted the tool, her blood making the handle slippery. Rick stumbled back, and she wrenched it from his hands.
“What’s your favorite flower?” she asked.
Related Feature: One Question: KB Jensen
Award-winning Author K.B. Jensen’s new collection of short stories, Love and Other Monsters in the Dark, will be published July 2022. She has two novels, Painting With Fire, an artistic murder mystery, and A Storm of Stories, which veers literary and handles love, craziness and impossibility. Painting With Fire has been downloaded over 75,000 times. K.B. lives in Littleton, CO., with her family. She teaches skiing and writes poetry. A former journalist, K.B. is a senior publishing consultant and writing camp director for My Word Publishing. Her work has appeared in Cherry Magazine, Progenitor and other publications. Visit www.kbjensenauthor.com.
