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Josephine Kellerman finally reached the end of her tether as far as she was concerned, and killing her husband was actually the easiest part. More difficult was figuring out what to do with the body.
                   Josephine had absolutely no intention of going to prison, especially for something as insipid as killing her husband, which she did not personally consider to even be a crime in any real sense of the word. What else was a successful, intelligent, completely gorgeous  female to do with such dead weight (if you'll excuse the pun) on her lifestyle? Divorce would be out of the question, a social faux pas that would make her damaged goods, and people could smell damaged goods from ten Ks away in a low breeze. Besides, Eric Kellerman would have gotten the last word in, one way or another, and that was simply unacceptable. It was the last word that had drawn this joke of a relationship out for three long years, and would have continued to draw it out for many more seasons to come had Josephine not taken drastic measures to end the whole mess.
                   It’s not like she hadn’t tried to break up with him. She had, numerous times, dozens even, more times than she could remember off the top of her head. And the problem wasn’t that he was difficult to get rid of, either. Quite the contrary, he always been far too comfortable with the idea. The problem was the last fucking word, it always had been. She would call him up and tell him it’s over, Eric, it’s done, I don’t want to see you any more, you’re a fuckwit and a cocksucker, and before she could hang up on him he would always say Sure Josie, that’s fine, no worries, do you want me to bring back the clothes you’ve left at my place? and she wouldn’t be able to go through with it. She couldn’t. There was absolutely no point in breaking up with a man if you couldn’t leave him crippled somehow, and there was no way that she was going to come out of this looking like he had dumped her. So the relationship had persisted, and at the end of the second year, around Christmas time, he had produced an offensively inexpensive ring bundled up in tacky festive giftwrap and asked her to marry him. Although she could think of few fates that she would consider more torturous, how could she possibly have refused? He would only have shrugged his shoulders, snapped the box closed, and said That’s okay Josie, I guess it’s over then, I’ll find someone else to spend my life with and he would have walked out and made her damaged goods, without so much as a string of drunken voicemail messages or an optimistic bunch of delivered flowers. That son of a bitch.
                   He had it coming, that much she never doubted. It had been a powerful act of impulse that had driven her to it, regrettably not something she had been able to plan, and so she had been left with the problem of the corpse on the kitchen table. The ticking of the clock above her head as it counted away the seconds was suddenly a very pressing sound. It was a Monday night, he would be missing from work on Tuesday and it wouldn’t be long before the company started asking questions. She folded her arms and looked down at him, running her tongue slowly across the edge of her upper teeth. Eric seemed to look back at her with the one eye that wasn’t gushing blood.
                   “That’s right, you stupid prick,” she said, “You got what was coming to you. Who got the last word this time, cockhead?”
                   It had been the greatest break-up in history, a perfect work of art, nobody could ever hope for better. She almost wished she could turn back time and do it over again. She had been at the sink, carving a block of cheese, idly aware of his lingering presence. Every so often he would sniffle or clear his throat or turn the page of the Courier Mail with unnecessary clamour. It had been a habit of his to make little noises constantly to assure the people around him that he was still around, the attention-seeking bastard. Always clearing his throat or coughing deliberately or sighing or groaning as he moved from one part of the house to another. It was maddening, like some kind of Pagan torture device designed to extract confessions from war prisoners. He was incessant, and the less she validated him by openly acknowledging his presence, the louder and more conspicuous he became. After about twenty minutes of this, and she ignoring him, he drew in a loud breath and spoke.
                   “Maybe we should go on a holiday,” he said, “Up north or somewhere. You know, see the reef, or something.”
                   “No,” she replied, and then, so quickly that even she herself was almost unaware of it, she turned and launched herself across the kitchen, thrusting the cheese-knife into his face. It entered his eye and went in so far that she drove her knuckle into the red, spongy matter that filled the new hole in his head.
                   Eric made the exact sound that he always made when he came. Josephine noted this with a kind of abstract amusement. The deep, throaty grunt that had always signified the end of an uninspiring act of sexual congress was the last sound that Eric Kellerman ever made. It wasn’t even close to a word, he didn’t even move his lips. The sound was coupled with a kind of wet pop like bubblegum, and the release of pressure inside his head pushed the contents of his skull out of his open eye socket. Something that looked like a warm mixture of blood, water and bits of Camembert cheese flowed over her hand and drenched the newspaper beneath. She pulled away, and for a moment he sat upright, frowning with his head slightly cocked, looking almost inquisitive. Then he fell forward onto his face, but the handle of the cheese-knife blocked his descent and his head wound up lying on its side, staring up at her. He looked comical, like a discarded puppet.
                   “Take that, you dumb fuck!” she screamed at her husband, “Not so vocal now, are you? Who got the last word that time, fucker!? Who!?”
                   Eric’s lungs slowly released a low, almost inaudible hiss of air, which parted his lips and came out in a quiet wheeze. It was almost as though he was still trying to speak, to get the last word in before his spirit disintegrated, but he never managed anything that could be recognised as a word. Josephine had won, and now the only thing left was to figure out how to get away with it.
                   First of all, she knew that she would have to deny that Eric had even returned home that night. She had watched enough episodes of CSI to know that, if you happen to be murdered in your own home, your spouse will become the primary suspect by default. The only alternative would be to stage a home invasion, to break in through her own window, overturn all the furniture, and beat herself up. Even then, what kind of half-arsed investigation would arrive at the conclusion that her husband had sat quietly in the kitchen, reading the Courier Mail, while some punk had wrecked his home, beat his wife, and then stabbed him in the eye with a cheese knife? The bastards were too good for that. She ran the scenario through her head as though it was playing out on TV, watched Gary Sinise and his glamourous team of crime scene investigators as they probed her husband’s body, scraped and prodded and sliced, picking up a broken puzzle of hair samples and fabric fluff and skin flakes and fingerprints that pieced together to incriminate her beyond reasonable doubt. The next thing for her would be to find herself locked in a room and interrogated harshly by a rugged, quirky Vincent D’Ofrino. For a few minutes she imagined stripping him down and banging him senseless, before her mind returned to the matter at hand.
                   Clearly, the answer was for there to be no body to investigate in the first place. And she couldn’t simply do the lazy thing and bury him in the backyard or in some garbage dump or on the bottom of a river, they knew better than that, they would dig the bastard up and she would be rooting Agent Gorron in a room with no windows in no time. Eric’s body needed to be better than hidden, it needed to be destroyed. That of course meant acid or fire, but even these seemed dubious. She doubted that she could build a fire large enough without bringing attention to herself, and as for the acid idea… well, it would look exceedingly suspicious for a suburbanite wife to go out and purchase enough acid to melt a corpse the day after her husband’s inexplicable disappearance. What was more, both of these solutions were likely to leave some form of remains, bones and ashes and DNA. What she needed was a way to dispose of him in entirety, ideally to open up some kind of vortex and warp him away from space and time. That was, unfortunately, a physical impossibility.
                   Or, was it?
                   Simply thinking about her predicament reminded Josephine of something that Erin Hooper had said to her only days earlier, in a café in the city. Erin had ordered a flat white with skim milk, and instead of sugar she had stirred in a tablet of artificial sweetener from her purse, the kind that tasted more like hard industrial chemicals than sugar.
                   “Those are carcinogenic,” Josephine had said, and Erin had snickered.
                   “Good,” she said, “Chicks with cancer lose weight fast. My cousin lost about twenty kilos. One of her tits rotted off, though.”
                   Josephine nodded and smiled, running her eyes over the other woman’s frame as she tried to dissolve the tiny pill with her spoon. Erin had a decent figure, but she had a slightly fatter arse and her tits weren’t quite as round. Josephine’s body was naturally perfect, and she barely even had  to work to keep it that way. She didn’t know whether she had a fast metabolism to thank or whether she just had all her genes in the right place, but whatever the explanation, she had the good fortune to be able to eat just about anything she wanted, within reason, and still look stunning.
                   When the waitress had put Josephine’s drink down in front of her, Erin looked as though the sudden pressure in her skull was going to launch both of her eyeballs across the table like corks from a shaken wine bottle. “What the fuck is that!?” she had shrieked, startling the waitress quite badly.
                   “White hot chocolate,” Josephine had replied, and then she looked up at the waitress with her eyebrows hoisted, as though to say Yes? Can I help you?
The waitress, a too-skinny girl who looked about nineteen and had no discernable arse whatsoever, smiled uneasily and left them.
                   “How many calories are in that shit?” Erin asked, and from the way she leered at it, one could easily be led to believe that the drink had been served in the Holy Grail.
                   Josephine shrugged and sipped at the beverage. It tasted like marshmallows, melted and dissolved in full cream milk, easily her favourite drink.
                   “I swear, Jose, there’s some kind of fucking vortex in your stomach. Like a black hole or something. It sucks in all those calories and warps them away to Alpha Fucking Centauri.” She looked down at her own drink and quietly added, “Bitch.”
                   As Josephine now gazed at her (ex) husband, the contents of his head soaking into the Business section of the Courier Mail and three centimeters of the handle of a cheese knife propping his face up like a painter’s easel, her hands crept up her perfect thighs to meet, fingers intertwining, at the pierced nub of her belly. Here was a novel concept, and one that she couldn’t entirely disregard, if only for the fact that a novel concept was exactly what she needed. And was it not a fitting end for a man who, on many a night, had woken her from a perfectly sound sleep so that he could force himself inside of her with animal vigour? The only question was whether it was truly feasible. The ultimate taboo, certainly, and probably one of the last remaining. But was it possible? That’s the million-dollar question, Eddie. Josephine decided, for lack of a better plan, that there could be little harm in finding out.

It just so happened that Tobias Squint, Josephine’s late father whose heart had finally collapsed at the age of seventy-five under the pressure of what must have been enough cholesterol to fill the deep fryer at McDonald’s, had been a butcher in his youth. What was more, he had been a British butcher. One thing that could be said about the British was that they knew their meat.
                   Tobias had been uncharacteristically handsome for an Englishman, at least before he hit forty, when his hair started falling out and his weight became a pressing concern that he would never truly attempt to address, even though he knew it would eventually kill him (which of course it did). Josephine’s mother had picked him up in a club one night because she had always harboured a kind of fetish for uncouth, violent poms, and Josephine herself had been conceived, apparently, in the public toilets of the same club on that very night. The pregnancy had been the genesis of a rather short-lived and turbulent marriage that finally ended when Tobias got drunk and banged a prostitute at a friend’s buck’s night.
                   Josephine’s mother had always been a woman of strong priorities. Tobias had put her in hospital three times during their seven-year marriage and she had never once dreamed of leaving him, but there was no way she was going to put up with him cheating on her with some slut. That was downright low.
During her adolescence, before her spineless waif of a mother had finally gathered the courage to throw the bastard out of the house for good, Josephine figured that she had eaten just about every part of an animal that there was to eat. Her father had known recipes for things most people didn’t even realise were edible. He had boasted the ability to make an entire pig vanish within a week, alone and without increasing his consumption. It was just a matter of incorporating some part of the animal into everything that he prepared. The flesh, of course, was the easiest part, but it constituted less than thirty percent of the whole animal. Most of it was organs and sinew, blood and bone. The liver, kidneys and lungs could be baked into a rather tasty pie, while the digestive tract made a good casserole with the right ingredients. Nuggets of bacon, bits of brain and organ and tendons and chunks of random pig bits could be incorporated into everything from mashed potato to stew and stir-fry to rissoles. The skin and ears, when salted and roasted, made a delicious snack for between meals. Tobias even made sausages out of the dregs of the carcass by compacting it into lengths of intestine, and cooked something called black pudding which was made from blood. He even found a use for the hooves, utilising them in the creation of a peculiar dessert that was essentially cold meat encased in tough jelly. And while he had never demonstrated this neat party trick for his family, all it ever took was two or three beers for him to start talking about it, and though it disgusted her mother, Josephine had always been morbidly interested.
There were a few problems that Josephine could now clearly foresee. First, Eric Kellerman was not a pig, not physiologically at least, he was a human being. Second, Josephine did not have the appetite nor the metabolism of a growing Englishman. Third, no matter how well her father had been able to utilise a carcass, there was always a skeleton left behind at the end. There wasn’t much that one could do with bones, no matter how creative and resourceful a carnivore one was. Tobias had occasionally boiled them to add flavour to soup, but you couldn’t actually eat them. This would be unacceptable, for if she was going to leave any part of him behind, she might as well leave all of him. A skeleton was still a corpse, evidence that could easily lead right back to her should it be found and inspected. The most important thing was that there could be no part of him left by the time she was finished.
It was, however, the closest thing to a plan that she actually had. To make sure, she quickly ran it through her mind in the context of an episode of CSI. She pictured Gary Sinise’s puzzled expression as he scoured her home for clues and turned up absolute bupkis, nothing but the clean and sterile home of a single and prosperous  woman. That’s okay, Gary, she would say, It’s all good, I realise that you have to cover all the bases. She would even cook him dinner for his trouble, and they would share a good sized steak cut from Eric’s thigh, followed by a slice of black pudding, and perhaps have a quick bang on Eric’s bed after. Josephine didn’t know whether it was a feat that anybody had ever attempted before, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing that anyone would suspect of her, and that was the most important factor. Only one substantial question remained:
If a man could eat a pig in seven days, how long would it take for a woman of healthy build to consume an entire human male?

Eric lay spread-eagled upon the plastic tarp he had used to protect his Beamer, naked and looking like a modern parody of Da Vinci’s VetruvianMan. The kitchen table was pushed far to one side, the chairs piled on top of it, to make room. Josephine stared down at him as she held the telephone to her ear. The cheese-knife was still embedded in the mush of his eyeball.
                   “No, I’ve called everyone else,” she said, “If he’s not with you, then I don’t know where the fuck he is. Probably nailing that bitch from his office, what’s her name? The one with the fat arse. Anyway, I don’t care anymore. He can do what he wants.”
                   It wouldn’t serve in her favour to attract undue suspicion by acting more concerned than she would normally be. She had called all of Eric’s usual drinking buddies and the other pricks he hung out with, flirted with some of them out of boredom, and planted her alibi as carefully as foresight would allow. She had started the ball rolling, which meant that the countdown had most assuredly begun. Nobody would think much of Eric’s absence until the following morning, when many of his colleagues would connect his failure to show up at work with Josephine’s call the preceding night, and she would then receive a call regarding his condition, at which time she would report that she had not seen him in more than twenty-four hours. That would be the first day. Josephine considered that she would probably not need to deal with any police until the third day, which was when she figured it would be acceptable for her to report his disappearance officially. That meant that by day three, she would need to have disposed of enough of Eric to be able to hide the rest of him. The police would not have a search warrant at this stage, but the warrant would come eventually, and it would come sooner if they should notice anything suspicious. That meant she would have to keep Eric on ice to avoid any mysterious smells through the house.
                   By the time the warrant did come, and she figured it might be as late as day fourteen if she played it just right, Eric would have to have completely vanished. Not so much as an eyelash of him could remain on this plane of existence. If she succeeded, then nobody could possibly implicate her in the murder of her husband. She would have devoured him utterly, and with him, any evidence that he was dead. She would truly have had the last word.
                   First, though, she had to sample him. Obviously this was only a viable plan if she could stand the taste of him. With a carving knife, she took his manhood away from him (he wouldn’t be needing it) and indulged in a fantasy she had held secret almost every night since first meeting him.
   Yes, this would work.
                   Josephine recalled numerous occasions when her father had been drunk enough to attempt to instruct her on the finer points of butchery, as though this were a knowledge that she would need in her life. Until now, she had never considered this even a remote possibility, but as she flipped the newly slaughtered carcass of Eric Kellerman onto his belly, she praised herself for having listened in such morbid fascination. The only problem was that she lacked the proper tools, and was going to have to settle for messy and cumbersome alternatives.
                   Fortunately for her, one of her husband’s contemptible attributes had been a testosterone-fuelled passion for heavy tools that made a lot of noise. He had been notorious for his late-night shed binges, sometimes grinding and sawing on past midnight. Josephine decided that the neighbours wouldn’t find the sound of the chainsaw out of the ordinary tonight.
                   The pig would first need to be gutted, and she performed this action with relative ease, removing the organs and packing each one neatly away, labelling them as best she could according to her somewhat sketchy grasp of internal anatomy. She felt she did rather well, though what she labelled pancreas may have really been a gall bladder and vice versa. The carcass was then split, as neatly as possible, along the spinal column, dividing it into two halves, each of which she then further broke down.
The ham cut contained pound-for-pound the most meat of all, and Eric had two of these, both quite daunting in their sheer mass. She would concern herself later about how these gargantuan drumsticks were to be consumed in their entirety by a woman whose waist was barely wider than any one of them at their thickest point. For now, the only important thing was the job at hand. Josephine continued, next making the cut along the ribs that separated them from the loin, which was then quartered. The arms were then removed from the shoulder butt, which was finally separated from the head.
The entire process took her three hours and fourteen minutes, after which time she had made a smorgasbord of prime cuts from his entire miserable, parsimonious assembly. What lay upon the red-drenched tarp now didn’t even look like it had been human, apart from the gnarled, disembodied hands and the lone eyeball that had survived the ordeal, looking up at her from its socket in Eric’s obliterated head, in what seemed like it might have been anger.
That’s right, you fucker. Look at you. You’re a man of few words now, aren’t you.
She wrapped and labeled each piece of her ex husband with a butcher’s methodical nonchalance. It was good fortune that Eric kept a bar fridge downstairs, out of the way, which could easily be switched to its highest setting in order to create a rudimentary freezer to store away most of this meat for the long term, but clearly it wasn’t all going to fit. She was going to have to pack at least some of it into the regular kitchen freezer, which was almost like fishing for trouble, but it couldn’t be helped. Anything that she couldn’t hide downstairs, she would eat first.
The blood was the last part of him that needed to be collected and stored away, and she did so by draining the tarp into a large punch bowl. She had hoped to catch every drop of it, but had been surprised by the amount of splatter that a chainsaw through flesh actually caused. This she rectified by sponging up every red spot and draining it into the bowl, which she then placed in the fridge with a lid of Glad Wrap over it. She would later burn the sponge.
Now that Eric was prepared, it was just a matter of whittling him down to nothing while she dealt with the ramifications of his disappearance in the outside world. Tonight, there were more pressing concerns to which to attend, namely the systematic elimination of any evidence that Eric had been at home at all. Josephine found herself conflicted about what was best to do with his clothes – wash them and hang them as though they hadn’t been taken out of the wardrobe, or burn them? Was criminal science so advanced that they would be able to tell on which day the clothes were worn? She had placed them all in the bathtub and filled it with water as soon as she had stripped him naked, for fear that the blood would dry and stain on them, but would it matter? Would they find traces of blood even after the clothes had been washed? Her own clothes were now soaked in his blood as well. These were things that could incriminate her even without a body. Why didn’t she think of wearing a poncho while she hacked him up? That was what the character did in American Psycho, and she reprimanded herself harshly about having spent the entire duration of the film fantasising about banging Christian Bale instead of learning how to murder properly. Her fear was that, if she burned the clothes, their ashes might be found, pieced together, analysed. Burning clothes was a suspicious activity in itself, and such a discovery would almost surely trigger a search warrant and an investigation that wouldn’t end until her arrest. Which was the safest course of action? It was a gamble, and Josephine hated gambling. She didn’t understand the appeal of it. There was no control in gambling, the house had all the control, all that she could do was pick a number and hope it was the right one.
And Eric’s car! God, she had forgotten about it. If he had never arrived at home, then his car wouldn’t be in the garage. The first thing that the police would do upon hearing of his disappearance would be to search for his car. It stood to reason that Eric or his remains would be close to it. It would have to be far, far away from here. Preferably at the bottom of a lake somewhere. But what if somebody saw him arrive home tonight? What if somebody saw Josephine in the car later, in her attempts to dispose of it? Risk was not something that she liked to play with, but it seemed that she would have to take a few of them tonight. There was certainly no point in worrying about it; Eric was dead, and if she was to go back in time, she would have killed him again. The last word just felt too damn good.

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