Bean Pies

Some may call it Deja vu. My therapist says it’s PTSD. Of course, no one knows the full story. You should be honored to know you are the first person to hear my story. This tale is about a smell. This smell haunts my dreams, the vision haunts my nightmares. It’s become so recurring that I have started not sleeping at all. I even nearly got fired from my job after trudging through the door thirty minutes late, adorned in a mismatched suit and heavy dark circles around my eyes. The smell leaves me with searing headaches. And the worst part? It’s hidden everywhere.

I pulled myself together and booked a therapy appointment with the most expensive and qualified therapist in town (if you count four letters after their name as qualified). Most men have fantasies about sleeping with their wives, I have fantasies about what my wife will look like sleeping forever in a casket.

Just under every person’s fresh deodorant or designer perfume, the smell lingers. I only need to do one tiny task to bring this smell to life. After all, the living are a catalyst for the smell of the dead.

The therapist could never know what really haunted me, so as foolish as it sounded, I described the smell as a scented deodorant. I cried fat tears of grief and wrote poems regarding my great battle against “The Smell.” You had to be there to see the irony of the entire situation. She believed every word I said, despite her acclaimed qualifications. After meeting with so many unhinged rich men, I didn’t stand out too much.

See, that perfectly ridiculous story isn’t so far from the truth. Only replace the smell of deodorant with the smell of lifelessness and death. 

The first time I murdered someone really wasn’t much of an occasion to remember. My company was trying to secure a deal with Lenor Brooks. I had put on my finest Italian suit and spent fifteen minutes styling my hair to scream “we are professional! Make the deal!”

During the lunch break, a lousy intern spilled coffee down my shirt. I was the laughing stock of the meeting, our company was a joke. Enraged, I watched the intern laugh along with them, mouthing “sorry” through a fit of giggles.

After smelling of creamy coffee (which for the record I would never dare buy, the cream is fattening) for the entirety of the day, I followed the intern down Baker Street to the pie shop. Such a pitiful lack of taste. While pie in itself is a terrible excuse for a dessert, the pies at that particular shop are far too crumbly and lacking any flavor. I watched him walk in and waited.

Yes, it did cross my mind how absolutely deranged I had become but I choose not to think of it that way.  In school as a boy, we read books like The Pearl, Lord of the Flies, and Animal Farm to name a few. If these works of literature tell us anything, it’s that human’s natural instincts are primal. If savagery is the default, wouldn’t letting it come through a bit make me the closest to normally? And besides, people die every day, I would hardly consider ridding the world of a mediocre intern to be particularly savage. 

Maybe I wouldn’t have killed the intern but what happened next pushed me over the edge: he emerged from the shop carrying bean pie. Bean pie. Yes, you heard that correctly, the pie was made of beans. I had enough. I walked into a nearby alley, dark and abandoned. 

Right as the intern was walking by I screeched at the top of my lungs and dropped to my knees. The intern stopped and looked in my direction. He stumbled in blindly. 

“Hello? Who’s there? Are you okay?”

I was shielded by the dark shadows cast from the buildings on either side. There was a worn-down wooden baseball bat lying on top of a dumpster. Definitely a sign my instincts were correct. I hid the bat behind me and hunched over on the ground. When the intern got close, I hesitated. He looked down at me confused. 

“Cream coffee guy? What are you doing here?”

I slammed the bat into his head and he collapsed to the ground, lifeless. I heaved the body into a dump, he really was overweight. Probably should’ve laid off the pies. Maybe I was doing him a favor. I gently tiptoed around the mess of blood and baked goods. The alley smelled of cream coffee and bean pie. 

The reason I’m here today is that it isn’t only those two smells that have been etched into my mind. The smell of his freshly lifeless body lingers around me. It haunts me like a ghost but also blesses me. The ghost of the smell isn’t enough. I need to feel the rush, see the trickle of blood.

 You probably are scared right now. I would be too if I was in your shoes but you are simply a means to an end. Don’t take what I’m about to do personally. I don’t despise you like I did the bean pie guy. See this bat? This won’t hurt one bit. 

The girl tied to the chair struggled and attempted to rip free of her bonds. She stared in horror at the beast in front of her. Not even a sliver of a man could be found beneath his hungry eyes. What a poor, misguided creature. She wished for many things at that moment: that she could talk to him and explain how wrong he was, that she was anywhere but here, and mainly that she hadn’t gone into that stupid pie shop. She closed her eyes and surrendered to the society that created whatever broken human stood before her. 

The man realized that no amount of therapy or persuasion could ever feed his desires. There was only one solution the could make this man whole. The body slammed into the ground and the man was suddenly satisfied again, his burning passions quenched for a short period of time. As the second slave to his ruthless obsessions suffered the price, he realized the smell that was never too far away wasn’t PTSD or Deja Vu: It was nostalgia.