Meet Burger

It was a dungeon of sorts: Burger collected chains and fixed them tightly to the walls, sparing no expense either on manacles and torture devices. He also collected the skulls of his victims, and put them carefully on a ping-pong table covered with a once white bed-sheet. Such was Burger’s style – there was a peculiar contrast between frugal arrangements and grander, more elaborate props. He had spent five hours carving runes into the wrack by hand. The room which had been called a cellar by the previous owners was now exactly how he wanted it to be, complete with tall stacks of his favourite comics lying in organic piles.

Sitting calmly - he was always calm - on a deckchair, Burger was eating a burger and sipping occasionally at a can of cheap beer when he could muster the energy to reach down and pick it up from the floor where it rested cold. Whilst he munched slowly on his home made meal, he occupied himself with an old hobby. The inevitable interview would, he imagined, go something like this:

“So you’re… Burger?”

“Yes.”

“Is that your real name?”

“Of course not.”

“Alright then. Age?”

“Forty-three.”

“Height? Weight?”

“Five eight. Ninety seven and a half kilos.”

“And you were a primary school teacher?”

“Before I was arrested, yes.”

“Jesus Christ. And you admit it? You killed all of those people?”

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

“Do you ask a fish why it swims? Would you ask a runner why they chose to run a marathon?”

“And you ate how many of your victims?”

“Most of them. The tasty ones, I guess.”

“And how’d you tell if they’re tasty?”

At that point Burger would give the interviewer his best look.

“I taste them.”

He paused mid chew and picked something hard and unpleasant out of his mouth and flicked it away thoughtfully. Perhaps a walk? He considered carefully the prospect of fresh air whilst swallowing his last mouthful of meat and bun. No sauce. Sauce would spoil it.

“A walk, yes,” he said aloud to the pile of skulls which he was sitting in front of. They were arranged in a small triangular-based pyramid of three by three by three, faces outwards on all sides. He picked up his beer and with effort, and then got up with a little grunt of complaint, raising a hand slightly in goodbye to the skulls on his way back upstairs.

After locking up the concealed entrance to the dungeon as usual, Burger left his house and set off into the middle of Sunday, a few comics under his arm. In the warm sunshine, he slapped a pair of sunglasses onto his face, and trotted towards the park, hoping to find a bench.