The Little White Trip

They say that killing with a knife is the sex of murder. Two bodies coming together, opening the skin of another, the heat produced and lost by it all. To the real killer, there can be no other way. My friends deserved more of a chance than they were given ? all victims do ? but they seldom get it. I'm not one of those people who say shit like, ?You see it all the time, but you just never think that it could happen to you.' I'm prepared for the things I see, the things I know, but what happened to us doesn't happen to anyone. The way it all played out was worthy of the big screen, the thick, thick novels with one-word titles, but not for a group of high school kids. We had just graduated, and not even a week had grown from that date when our paths were cut short. I watched it happen. Even before the first strike, I saw it all going down. I accept my guilt for the part I played, the times I never spoke up, and the lies that I believed. But as I said before, what happened to us doesn't happen to anyone, so how could I have been expected to react much differently? It's not until you actually see the knife go in or the bloody parts of them left lying around that you really understand what you're into. I did that. I watched them die, and in the end, with my life one of the few and fleeting, I stepped into his world, a world where the fatal blow is merely a checkmate, and killing is just a game. This is our story, how it used to be and how it all ended up.Peter Joseph Gallagher is the author of 'The Little White Trip', published 2006 under ISBN 9780977930432 and ISBN 0977930432.