The Mutilation Machination by Shaun Jeffrey Read Free Book Online

killed a cat.
    I gingerly reached out and touched the body. Its fur still felt
warm and soft. My fingers brushed a red collar around its neck. The attached
tag on the collar told me the cat was called Sooty.
    Although it was only a cat, I couldn’t stand the thought of the
owner finding the dead feline in or at the side of the road, so I picked the
carcass up, and with nowhere else to put it, I dropped it in with the shopping
I had bought in town. I would bury it when I reached home.
    A car drove by, making me flinch. I wondered what it sounded like;
wondered what lots of things sounded like. Deaf since birth, I lived in a world
of unimaginable silence. The only time I had been glad of my deafness was when
I saw mother screaming after I alerted her to father’s body.
     
    When I arrived home, I reached into the bag and touched the cat.
Its body now cold, it had already started to go stiff. I stroked it once, and
then opened the gate and deposited the corpse outside my den at the bottom of
the garden before heading toward the house.
    “You took your time,” mother said as she took the shopping bags
from me. She enunciated each word so I could lip-read.
    I shrugged and signed that I had lost track of time.
    Mother smiled, but she couldn’t disguise the haunted look of the
bereaved. She started to say something else, but her lips stopped moving and
she pulled out a tin of baked beans dotted with blood. She frowned. “What’s
this?”
    Already one-step ahead, I weaved my fingers to say the steaks must
have leaked.
    Mother nodded. It was a reasonable answer, as the cuts of meat
often leaked.
    My sister, Vicky, sat in her highchair, playing with a rattle. I
smiled at her and she smiled back. She opened and closed her mouth and I
touched her cheek, feeling the vibrations of noise resonating through her skin.
While mother put the shopping away, I made my way out to the den, a wooden
structure four foot high and three foot square that I had built last summer.
    The cat lay on the grass outside. If it weren’t for the mangled
paw and the specks of blood, it would look as though it were having a catnap.
    I picked it up, opened the door and carried it into the den,
stooping as I entered.
    It was warm inside the room, and I stood up straight. Sheets of
plastic yellowed in the sun made the light that shone through the window appear
golden, illuminating the clocks that covered every surface.
    There were mechanical clocks, pendulum clocks, mantel clocks,
cuckoo clocks and clocks that I had made. Within the den, I could feel the
reverberating beat of the clocks like a huge heart, and feeling the familiar
tick-tock of the clocks through the ground and walls, I felt it was the closest
I came to actually hearing.
    Pieces of clocks cluttered the table against the back wall. There
were springs, cogs, levers, weights and a whole host of other parts. I swept
some of the bits aside and deposited the cat on the table while I searched for
a bag to put it in. Deciding on an old plastic one, I turned back and grabbed
the cat. Straight away, I felt the familiar pulse of the clocks through my
fingers. For a brief moment, I imagined the cat was still alive, that I had
made a mistake, that it wasn’t dead.
    A coiled spring unwound against the cat’s leg. I stared at the
clock components. If there was one thing I was good at, it was making broken
things work again. And that’s when the idea came to mind. What if I could mend
the cat? I wasn’t thinking I could bring it back to life, but perhaps I could
give it a semblance of life, could give it movement.
    I thought about it for a long while before I actually set to work.
    There was a penknife on the table. I picked it up and unfastened
the blade, feeling it click open. A thin sheen of sweat painted my brow as I
gingerly held the small penknife against the cat’s soft underbelly. This was
stupid. I couldn’t do it, and my stomach recoiled at the thought.
    With a shake of my head, I dropped the