It’s not often we get such passionless descriptions of death. To most, the sight of brutalised cadaver is to be met with extreme, debilitating emotion. At the very least, we are to treat the dearly departed with some respect.

You certainly wouldn’t comment on the physical attractiveness of that mutilated corpse.

 

But that is exactly what this narrator does. Landmann has presented a world in which the most horrific of crimes can be treated with abject apathy. Her narrator questions the appearance of a corpse with the same idle curiosity as a child poking roadkill with a stick. In this place, the only decent person is a carved up cadaver.  

 

What better way to deliver this unpleasant truth than with dry wit and sarcastic whimsy? If you want to unsettle your audience, that is.  And unsettle it does. This is a viciously cynical psychological thriller that contains important questions around home invasion, the effects of hyper-capitalism, the decay of moral values and the nature of modern woman to woman relationships.

 

Landmann has crafted something that reads like a female Fight Club. It is absolutely high tensile.

 

Can you stomach it?

 

Rose Petal Stains by K.A. Landmann

 

I can’t think of anything more startling than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name,

Or how we met,

Or why they’re dead.

Sighing, I wondered how I’d get the rose petal stains off of the couch cushions. I could see the layers of fat and muscle where incisions had been made, mostly in his abdomen but some cuts scattered across his chest. The careless way in which he’d been stabbed caused a tightness to form in my diaphragm; I deducted that this was a crime of passion.

However, that was irrelevant. The question swimming in my head, written in bold ‘Eras Medium ITC’, was this: why was it in my living room? I don’t think I’d killed him. Besides, this didn’t look anything like my handiwork: I am a being of calculation and precision.               

I pressed my bare feet against the carpet of the floor. Quiet shuffling friction. I grimaced at the drops of blood scattered from the body, sat upright on the other end of the loveseat, reaching to the front door. He’d been dragged here, all two-hundred or so pounds of him. One thing was certain: I would not be getting the deposit back on this apartment.

 Placing my hands on my hips, I stared at him with my head tilted as I tried to infer everything I could about this specimen. From his torso to his toes, he was slack with no rigidity to him. His skin was pale with a slight yellow undertone, presumably from the blood loss. Eyelids rested gently closed by his pronounced cheekbones which caused him to look a bit weaselly (definitely not my type). Although...if I blocked out his mangled torso, he looked as though he could be asleep. Alive.

 

 It had been a slow death, clearly. Probably taking a few hours to bleed out, begging the question of how nobody heard him screaming. Assuming he could scream.

 

The hollow sound of a balled fist against the hard wood of my door resonated through the almost empty room. I jog-walked towards the kitchen counter, looping my index finger through the ring of my key. Turning at a hundred-eighty degree angle, I made my way back towards the front door before proceeding to open it; I hadn’t left it unlocked, highlighting the question of how the body had been planted.

A girl, no older than twenty, stood a couple of paces from the door frame, dressed in a red and white ensemble. In her left hand, a box inscribed with ‘Kelly’s Confectionary’; in her right, a bouquet of red and purple roses.

“Miss Alice Bennett?” She asked sweetly, an artificial smile sculpted in place, only faltering as her eyes drifted (presumably) to the dead man slouched on the couch. Her eyes were wide only for a split second before she swallowed audibly and composed herself. “These were sent for you.” She grinned, a gloss of thick water forming over her blue eyes. She held the items in her hand out towards me, the cake vibrating and a petal falling from a rose.

I rolled my eyes knowing exactly who’d sent these.  I took them from trembling, perfectly French manicured hands; chienne de base.