Two Accounts of Killing

(1) A clipped voice belonging to a young man: “Downstairs.” As he speaks, he walks quickly down the stairs. It is an old apartment building, with a narrow stairwell and no elevator. The air seems full of dust. The stone stairs and dirty white walls are covered in blood. There is blood everywhere you look, but it is not flowing. It clings to the surfaces, to the walls and floor, very pale, looking orange-red, all the way down to the ground floor. The video’s title is “Over Two Hundred Knife Blows.” He says it was filmed where his grandfather lives. A man’s wife had kept fooling around with her ex-husband after the marriage, so a fragile but brave man hacked them both to death, striking more than two hundred times. He may have chased them, driving the knife into their bodies again and again as they ran for their lives. Or perhaps they were already mangled and bloody, barely alive as they fled downstairs. Someone says it is fake. He says that if it is fake, may his mother die.

(2) At dusk, someone kneels on the planted strip between the road and the sidewalk. The body slowly lowers and rises, as if kowtowing, covered in flames from the shoulders up. In front of the person stands a stocky man in plain clothes, upright, looking down, a flamethrower in his right hand. He does not move. Twilight and the distorted image erase the kneeling person’s edges, leaving only an outline, a gray-black figure with no discernible face or sex, like a Roman buried in volcanic ash at Pompeii. He worships the god before him. A human thanks the god for the gift of fire. The god is solemn because he does not move, unmoved by the person before him. The human is devout because he keeps kowtowing. February 2, Jiangsu. A man, apparently acting over his wife’s infidelity, burned his wife’s lover to death in the street with a homemade flamethrower. During the incident, the victim repeatedly begged for mercy but did not survive. When police arrived, the man readily confessed to setting the fire and was taken into custody and led away. “Fucking badass. Cremated him right there in the street.” “Now he’s really set his wife free.” “You’re overthinking it. His wife was already dead, burned to death in the car where they were having their affair.”