urge.

“Jesus Christ, man… what a rush huh?” Steven asked as the lights of the interstate lit up the cab of his pickup, his knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel. He was an emotional wreck.

“Yeah…” I answered back, as the light flooded the inside of the truck again, my attention was drawn from the guardrails and highway mile markers to the knife in my lap and the little bit of blood that had found it’s way onto my hand.

A few hours earlier it had only been bunch of drunken talk after too much whiskey and beer.

“Just think about it!” Steven had said a little too loud while we sat at the bar. “The ultimate fucking rush man! Total power. Like a god or some shit.” He looked into his drink longingly. The small bubbles from the bottom rising up to the surface, like this primal urge he had decided to bring up that night. Something dark, buried deep inside that somehow makes it’s way from subconscious to conscious thought.

“Well, there’s a lot that would have to go into it…” I began to explain.

“NO PLANS! People disappear all the time, man. You think if we offed some old homeless prick the police would really give a shit enough to try and find out who did it? Especially if we took the body somewhere.”

“You’re really serious about this?” I asked.

“Fuck yeah.”

I told Steven to wait until we finished our drinks to discuss this more. I had to get his loud mouth out of a public place if he was going to go on some sort of boisterous, testosterone trip just thinking about the idea of what he was suggesting we do that night.

After we made it to his truck, an old farm truck that had been given to him by his dad, Steven couldn’t contain himself anymore.

“Well, are you in or what man?!”
“I mean I’ve thought about it before, I’m sure everyone has… but you realize exactly what it means right? Going through with it and everything…” I said. “You’re snuffing out an actual human life, you know?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah dude,” was the only reply he could muster to that statement. “So you in or are you out?”

“In...” I replied.

As we drove through Wendover we traded our highway lighting for bright neons of casinos and dim glows of all night fast food joints.

“Fuck, what if someone looks in the back?” Steven asked nervously.

“Just chill out, that’s why we threw the other tarp over him. Don’t drive like a dick and get us out of town and take us out on some dirt road.

“Which one?”

“I don’t care Steven, just get us on one.”

We had stopped at my place, Steven pleaded that we go there instead of his apartment so we wouldn’t wake up his girlfriend. We stood in my kitchen discussing the plan and setting aside any materials we thought we would need.

“So we’ve got a garbage bags, a tarp, a few rolls of duct tape and rags.” I said.

“Fuckin eh, man! We’re really going to do this shit!” Steven exclaimed as he practiced stabbing motions with a large kitchen knife I had left out from cooking earlier in the day. Each jab he made with the sharp knife looked comical, like he had been doing it in the mirror for weeks, it was almost hard to take him seriously.

“Well how are you going to do it?” I asked him.

“Hmm, not the knife. Too messy for me I think. What if I just take some of this rope and strangle the fucker with it?”

“Any way you want, man.” I answered back.

Before leaving my place we packed the tarp and tape in the truck and at the last moment I grabbed the large knife that Steven had been playing with.

“What do you need that thing for? All we need is my handy-dandy rope.” Steven said with a sick grin on his face while he dangled and waved his piece of “strangling rope” as he had come to call it, in front of my face.

“Never know, we might need it.”

Steven was botching it. The old man had begun to turn blue in the face but still continued to struggle against him, and as the sweat formed on Steven’s brow I could tell this whole endeavor had become a struggle for him. Steven had cut the length of rope that he was using to strangle the man too short and decided that maybe his hands would work better. There was a pause in his actions. Maybe it was in this moment that Steven realized that this was all grandeur, an idea that many people never bring to fruition because they simply can’t bring themselves to face the reality of it.

I could have just pulled Steven off the man and we could have let him go, because who would believe some drunk old hobo, but Steven had brought me into this. And whether or not he could actually go through with it now, we had to finish what he started that night. Without a word I pulled Steven off of the old man and buried the kitchen knife into his chest, almost to the handle. Pain and helplessness filled the eyes of the old man, like when a child burns their hand on the stove. Confused, hurt, scared. He wheezed but continued to struggle against me. Pushing at my face and chest until I put the blade into his chest three more times. And as we stepped back from this scene in the quiet, dark alley on the West Side of Salt Lake City where we had followed this homeless man, I said “Steven, get the tarp and the duct tape.” Steven was visibly shaken. He had turned pale and his eyes were glazed over. His hands shook and his knees were slowly beginning to buckle. The sweat on his brow continued to pool.

“Holy fucking shit, man… I… we…you…”

“Steven,” I said as I turned to him, meeting his now empty gaze, “get the tape and the tarp.”

We had been traveling down a dirt road for about twenty minutes in silence when Steven said, “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Well, how do you feel about it? You wanted to do it, right?” I asked him.
“Yeah… sure… of course I did…but just thinking back on it, man. You fucking stabbed that guy to death…”

“You weren’t doing a very good job of strangling him. What if he had gotten away or something? Then what?,” I asked.

“Well I don’t know… I wanted to use the rope because it was cleaner. I mean now we’ve got this dudes blood on us because you decided to stab him.”

“You’re making it sound like I decided to kill this guy.”

“Well… I mean you are the one that actually killed him… you stabbed him all those times.”

“Four times,” I said.

“What?” Steven responded.

“Nothing.”

“Anyway man, you were the one who stabbed him. Like you said, I probably wouldn’t have even killed him, I couldn’t even do it right.”

“Stop here.” I said.

“What?”

“Stop here, Steven.”

I moved the blade from my lap onto the bench seat of the pick up and looked Steven in his eyes. “Are you saying that this is all on me?”
“Well I mean if it ever came down to it and lawyers got all technical I suppose… that you would be the one to blame… but …” he replied nervously. “... I don’t want you to think I would ever tell anyone about this…”

A very strange moment of silence filled the cab of the old farm truck as it sit in the middle of the Nevada desert.

“Let’s talk about this later. I just want to get this taken care of.” I said with a nervous grin on my face. “We can stop somewhere and get breakfast and then we’ll get home and sort this all out.” Steven seemed relieved by me saying that.

“Okay, man,” his face grew a nervous smile as well.

“I think this will be a good spot to leave him.” I said. “Why don’t we get it over with?”

I waited for Steven to step out of the truck first.

“I’m just going to grab some extra tape in case we need it,” I told him.

And as he moved to the bed of the truck, I grabbed extra tape, a few garbage bags and my large, sharp kitchen knife from the seat of the truck, as I would be needing it all to deal with Steven.