Andrias Yose

     Just kidding! The title, "Murder He Wrote" my feeble (but unsarcastic) attempt to make fun of an old television investigative serial popularly known as, "Murder She Wrote." I don’t remember her name, but if I am not mistaken, the main actress’s real first name is Rebecca. I haven’t the foggiest of recollection of her last name. If she’s still alive, she would probably be around 80 something years of age.
     I would like to remind you that what you will read below can get graphic. It is not pretty, and many people would find the incidents below to be distasteful. Below are a few real slaughtering incidences. Some involved animals, while others involved humans. I have never witnessed it personally except through television and my computer.
     Earlier, I watched a 1/2-hour TV programme about a young woman’s exploration to remote areas in Indonesia. She was tasked to tell the stories based on her own experience and what she has learnt. In the episode I watched, she visited another remote indigenous tribe that was holding a special annual festival, which I am rather embarassed to admit, I didn’t pay enough attention to remember.
     Somewhere in the middle of the festival, one of the rituals that the tribe had to perform is the slaughter of animals as offerings to their god/s. First animal slaughtered was a young chick (chicken, mind you! not chick = young female!). Second animal they slaughtered were a couple of fat pigs. Here, it got interesting (for me).
      The two pigs had their limbs bound by ropes, and then two men would take turn to chop off the head of each pig. I found it interesting because I got to watch something rare and unusual. Something that I rarely got the chance to witness, or hardly would ever want to witness in real life at all.
     So one men swung his blade down unto the poor pig’s neck, and then moved away. The pig squealed very loudly as its body jerked wildly about, and fell to one side. The man swung one more time, the pig squaled and jerked another. A second man came, swung his blade, and the pig reacted the same way, but this time it felt on the other side. After the two men had swung the pigs’ heads a few times, the other tribe members (the males) carried the pigs onto a small stone altar. There they drained the blood out of the pigs. Here it got interesting, too. Though both pigs had been chopped at for several times, one of them had not died yet. It was, no, I, I felt squeamish.
     The third animal they slaughtered for sacrificial purpose was a rather large cow. The cow’s horns were tied with a long rope and tied tight from it’s horns down it’s tail and then tied to a wooden pole a few meters behind it. In front, it’s nose was also tied with a rope. I think they drilled a hole through the poor cow’s nose so that the rope could enter between the nostrils. From the nose, the long rope was tied cross-tangent to the left side of the cow onto another long wooden pole. This wooden pole was held tight by two men, and behind them, three to four men held tight to the end extension of the rope.
     An elder man, probably the chief of the tribe held a traditional blade, mimicked a slashing move across the cow’s neck. The blade touched the cow’s neck, but only at its blunt side (not the sharp side). After, another man, around mid thirties replaced the elder man. He made a mimicking move once. Then the slaughter became.
     The man swung his blade horizontally and whacked hard at the poor cow’s neck. Urgh! I didn’t hear whacking sound, of course, because the television editor had ‘kindly’ subdued that with a rather loud background music. Yet my imagination subdued that background music, and replaced it with a loud whacking sound of bone, flesh and meat split apart.
     Once the blade swung, the neck cut open with an angular size probably around 12 degree. Blood spurt out like sprinkled water forward. Everybody, except those that were holding the poles tightly, moved away backwards rather quickly. I could see that when the blade hit the cow and split it’s throat open, the cow went into a state of psychological reaction delay. It’s like when you got wounded, but you didn’t feel the pain instantly. You felt the pain a fraction or a few seconds later.
     Right at the moment when the cow’s brain registered the feeling of pain, the cow instinctively reacted by jerking it’s body and moved a few steps backward. The cow kept trying to move backward, and around 3-4 seconds later, as it’s body’s nerves spasm-ed, the cow’s legs shook, and slowly it tumbled unto the earth.
     All the men rushed in quickly to pin the cow down to the ground, and another man brought a metallic tray and placed that under the opened throat to collect the cow’s blood. The cow was still alive. Soon, the tray was filled with the cow’s blood, and the people of the tribe soaked one or both hands with the blood in the tray, and rubbed it onto a large uniquely hand-crafted tree that has been decorated especially for that festival. The act of rubbing the blood onto the chopped tree trunk was to bless the tree and also to be blessed by their god/s.
     The day before today, I was watching another wild adventure documentary in television. The focus of the documentary was on the Komodo Dragon in Indonesia. Somewhere in the middle of the programme, they showed an adult male deer (I forgot the term for a male deer; gender-specific) who had been wounded on its right hind leg the previous day or so by a Komodo Dragon. The Komodo’s mouth and especially its saliva contained several poisonous stuffs along with the contagious organisms.
     Komodo Dragon do not usually kill its prey directly, but wound it first with its bite and saliva. Once the death touch has been performed, a Komodo Dragon needs only to bite its time for its prey to weaken and then the Komodo Dragon would put an end and/or consume it. The adult male deer’s right hind leg had been bitten, and signs of decaying and rotten flesh had took its form around where the leg was bitten.
     Sensing (by instinct) that its prey was weakened, the Komodo Dragon launched its final attack. It chased the deer aggresively, launching a bite here and there to speed up the toxin that was already spreading inside the deer. Some minutes passed (I presumed it probably took between 1/2 hour to 3 hours, but in the programme that event must have been edited due to time constraint, and the audience saw the whole event happening only within a matter of minutes),  the deer finally drained of its breath and energy, lay down on the ground.
      The deer didn’t even try to stand up and run away when the predator inched its (Komodo Dragon) way towards it (deer). Still alive, the deer got bitten on its left top shoulder. Still alive, the Komodo Dragon twisted and pulled at the skin and meat. The Komodo Dragon didn’t care if its prey was still alive, its animal instinct registered only to tear that portion of meat, chomp it, savour the flavour of living raw meat and blood, and fill its stomach. (Cool… Very descriptive).
      Then the camera focused onto the bulging dark-brown or black right eye of the deer. Each attempt the Komodo Dragon tried to tear out the deer’s flesh, the deer let out a helpless yet painful whimper. The sound the deer made was not just noise from its vocal throat, but breathe. The breathe of a dying, and helpless creature who recognized and saw its own death coming.
      It was distasteful for me to see that, but I had to keep my eyes and my mind opened. Because what I saw was a natural process. At least, it was natural for the Komodo Dragon.
     Two years ago while I was in my office, I downloaded several stuffs from the Internet using Limewire P2P program. I think it’s probably because part out of curiousity and part out of boredom that I keyed in death and dying as the search keywords. Several stuffs turned up. One of them had a title that went something like, "Arab man slaughtering Russian soldier," something like that. I downloaded that.
     When I had downloaded it, I ran it.
     The clip was short, probably ran about 15 - 20 seconds. It was black and white, and there was no audio output (meaning: you can’t hear any sound).
     In the clip I saw this pale faced man wearing a soldier-like uniform lying on the ground. The camera focused on its head, and someone’s foot was pressing the pale man’s face on the ground. The foot had a boot, and it was a black leather boot that also looked like a military or soldier’s boot. The camera then moved upward, and the face of the man standing revealed a bearded face. He was probably in his mid to late thirties (30s). He wore an army cap, and dressed in an army uniform. By the look of his face, you would know immediately that he and the man under him belonged to different race.
      I do not know whether they were really a Russian and an Arab soldiers, but one thing’s for sure. The man on the ground had a pale or fair complexion, while the man standing had a curly and massive beard covering its face. The man standing also had a darker complexion, but not so dark as Haitians or Africans.
     The camera focused downward again upon the pale-faced man, zooming on his face. Then, without warning, a large hunting knife (the one that Sylvester Stallone used in the movie, "Rambo) came and drove into the pale-faced man’s throat. It went into the throat.
     As it went, I could not help but realizing how tender the flesh in our throat really was. Because the way the knife entered the throat was like as though you thrust a regular kitchen knife to a piece of large tender grilled turkey.
     Once the knife had penetrated deep enough into the throat, the perpetrator moved the knife up and down in vertical and forward motion. The sharp edge of the knife was facing the left side, and as it moved rhythmically, the throat got cut open from inside out.
     The man on the ground didn’t struggled much. Between the time the knife entered his throat and cut it wide open, the man just went into a shock, and his body jerked as though someone had given him a light dose of electric current. His mouth was gaping, and his eyes bulged.
     Then the clip ended.
     After I had watched that once, I was in a state of heightened disbelief. I couldn’t believe what I just saw. The rational part of my brain asked, "Is that for real?" The shocked part of my brain said to myself, "What the …?!" Then another thought crossed my mind, "Oh my go….!"
     I watched that clip one more time. And then one more time, and one more time. I don’t know what made me watched that clip several times over. I guessed it might be because of that dark fascination I have towards death, being a witness to someone on the verge of life and death, and my sudden awareness of how really fragile we humans are.
     Nevertheless, that was one of the most distasteful things I’ve seen in my life.
     Back in my early teenage years, one of the materials I used to read on was a British tabloid newspaper. I don’t remember the name of the tabloid, but it dealt mainly with superstitious stuffs, prophecies, angels and devils, the afterlife, seances, and so. I remembered that on one publication, they had this one page black and white picture of a young girl, probably 8 or 9 years old got pinned in-between two sections of a train.
     As you might have seen it in some movies that have trains, each train section is connected with another through one or two very strong pieces of chained metal (that can be separated). The train I saw in the picture seemed to come from the period of late 1800s and early 1900s. The train’s sections were connected with two large cylindrical solid iron bars that clamped at each other to join two separate sections. Well, that girl was pinned, or should I say squashed in-between.
     The two metal bars pinned directly onto her chest.
     While still on the subject of train related death, another clip came to mind. This time it dealt with a moving train. The clip was also black and white, and there was no sound.
     A man and a child, probably father and son were standing on behind the train’s track. The child’s probably around 11 to 13 years of age. In the clip, you can see the train coming from the left corner and moving to the right side of the screen at a speed that I am guessing somewhere in the 10-20 km/h.
     Then for no reason in particular, the boy dashed forward into the track. And the train drove full force towards the child. A flash of blur. And suddenly the boy’s body was seen flying in the air.
     I don’t know whether that child lived to tell his story, but I highly doubt that he survived at all. But the moral of the story is, if you have a child, hold that child tightly near you, and don’t let go, especially when you and your child are standing very close to a moving object that can potentially kill you. The next moral in the story is, we are human beings, not superman, don’t try to stop a train with your body, it is plain stupid. I will not apologize for this previous sentence should you find it distasteful. Once in a while I have a weird sense of humour. One of the things I try to find humour in, is death.