Free Killing Auntie by Andrzej Bursa

we’ll meet again.”
    â€œWell, I’ll live in hope.”
    We stood in silence. I was focused, filled with blossoming joy.
    â€œIt’s really great …” I mumbled after a while.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThat I’ve found the red elf!” I cried out, pointing quickly at a red light glowing in the distance.
    We both burst out laughing.

8
    I T WAS A CLEAR, STARRY NIGHT . I WAS RETURNING FROM MY date with Teresa. I walked with my head high, listening with pleasure to the sound of my steps echoing off the pavement. “Teresa, Teresa,” sang my youth. Barely four days had passed from our first meeting and I was already riding the high crest of my love. With the submissiveness of a weak character – which I’d been told I had – I allowed Teresa to take over all my thoughts and imagination. Even when I was thinking about other things somewhere through the back of my mind’s eye passed the images of her face, her smile, her eyelashes with snowflakes on them or her hands in old leather gloves, which had became a holy relic to me.
    We saw each other every day. We both had no doubt it was love. “Love, love,” I kept saying to myself aloud when alone in my flat. I hadn’t neglected the corpse. Fortunately the cold weather held fast so the regularly replenished ice kept the body from decomposing. Only once during the last three days had I wrapped some innards up in paper and discarded them on the suburban rubbish dump often visited by ravens and cats. That trip cost me a lot of time and effort and the result was rather measly. Once more I had to admit that the corpse was a tough opponent and fighting it required a lot of willpower, courage and ingenuity. I hadn’t given it much time lately but I wanted to bring it to an end as soon as possible. I was getting bored with it.
    I was slowly coming to the conclusion that the period when the struggle with the corpse filled the void in my life was over. The corpse had been replaced by Teresa. Yet I could not accept this conclusion without reservations. I knew that a woman could not fulfill or replace all the various longings and desires that tore at my soul; I knew that nurturing my love for Teresa would mean killing it, too. And yet, under the influence of this girl I was beginning to recover my faith in life. I knew it was an illusion, and I kept telling myself so. I had wasted too many years dreaming about traveling, adventures and the exciting life that awaited me. (Too many times I had been punished for my dreams by everyday objects in our flat, by the lecture hall, by all that machinery of terror that closed up on me, seemingly forever.) Yet when I was with Teresa I felt calm and believed, against all reason, that I was still destined for great things.
    These fanciful musings seemed to be confirmed by my recent experiences. After all, killing Auntie and struggling with the corpse was definitely something. And my situation as a man standing between the gallows and an unknown adventure was not devoid of a certain dramatic grandeur. Nevertheless, it’s not exactly the kind of drama I had in mind, not the sort of deed that Teresa’s knight should be famous for. Such and similar thoughts crossed my mind in those days. Those thoughts and reflections were rather superfluous, unable to affect the great lightness that filled me. The pangs of fear still happened. I was aware that I was pushing my luck, dragging my feet about reporting to the police while doing nothing about getting rid of the remains.
    In such moments my head would explode with brilliant ideas of annihilating the corpse. Once, as I was falling asleep with the image of Teresa under my eyelids, I was gripped by a spasm of fear. Any attempt to talk myself out of it and stay in bed were in vain. I dragged myself out from between the sheets and went into the kitchen. I rummaged through the sideboard and found the meat grinder. With some difficulty I clamped