Monday, May 22, 2006

Bodies Day!

Today an ingenious police detective is going to come to your house and he�ll tell you that he wants to look at the bodies in your tool shed. You�ll calmly ask him, �What on earth would make you think that there are bodies in my tool shed, detective?� The detective will smile slightly when he says, �If there are no bodies in your tool shed you should have no objection to leading me to it and letting me peek inside.�

You�ll lead the detective to the tool shed. At the door to the shed, you�ll ask, �Will you really insult me so dearly as to make me open up my private tool shed like I was a common criminal?� The detective will wait without answering. You�ll open the shed.

�Okay,� you�ll say as the detective stammers to react at the bloody pile of nine male corpses inside the shed. �Yes, my landscaping staff is dead and piled up in my tool shed, and yes, I didn�t want you to see this. But it wasn�t to hide the fact that I killed them. It was to protect their secret.�

�What secret!� the detective will exclaim from behind the handkerchief he�s holding over his nose and mouth.

�They were lovers,� say.

�All nine of them?�

Point to each of the men, one by one, and say who they are and for whom they held an intolerable, unrequited love. �The one with his arm all twisted up, that�s Murray. He loved Keith there with the hole in his face. But Keith loved Jeremy, the one with the meathook in his eye. Unfortunately for Keith, Jeremy had the hots for Louis, the guy at the bottom there without any head. And Louis was way jonezing for Leonard, back when he had a head of course. That�s Leonard there with the nineteen bullet holes in his back.�

When you�re finished identifying each of the mauled and gored corpses and the respective objects of their affections, the detective will ask, �And so they all committed suicide? At the same time?�

�I just kept walking around finding their bodies and dragging them out here to the shed. It was a terrible day for me, as you can imagine.�

The detective will point out that their wounds are not consistent with suicide. �Am I to believe that Leonard was so distraught with longing that he shot himself in the back nineteen times? And what about Daniel, the one whose limbs have all been sawed off and sewn back on to the inappropriate sockets, so that it appears he has a leg sprouting from his neck.�

Shout, �Yes! It worked!� Then explain that to keep their homosexual suicide pact a secret, you took to mutilating and shooting their bodies in order to make it look like they were the victims of a terrible mass murder. Say to the bodies, �You can rest peacefully gentlemen. Your secret will be interred in your graves alongside your earthly vessels.�

The detective will still not be convinced, so you�ll have to show him the nine suicide notes. He�ll wonder why all nine notes were written in the same handwriting, and you�ll explain that the men were not native English speakers, and since they knew they would be found by American investigators, they asked you to write the notes for them.

�But I didn�t think they were the ones who were going to commit suicide,� say. �They asked me to write letters and fill out forms for them all the time, and oftentimes they told me it was for a friend, as they did with these here letters.�

The detective will note at the bottom of each letter is the plea, �Whoever finds this, please keep my suicide and the reason behind it a secret somehow.� He�ll find it odd that someone who writes a suicide note which details his reasoning for committing suicide would then hope to keep his suicide a secret. Even more odd is when nine people have the exact same idea.

�But that would explain why you would want to make this look like a mass murder,� he�ll say.

�Will you help me detective?�

The detective will say, �I obey the law son. And there is no more powerful law than the law of love. Now let�s get these boys in the ground before the media shows up and the whole world finds out that their hearts were just too full of longing to keep on beating.�

The detective will help you bury the nine dead landscapers underneath the expansive back lawn that they spent so many years tending. Then he�ll ask you to show him your pantry, where the mangled bodies of your fourteen-member kitchen staff rest in a precarious pile that nearly reaches the ceiling.

Happy Bodies Day!