Human Relations

Is it conceivable that those innocents
might ever have imagined even in
the most hideous of frightening
nightmares that their family home
would be transformed into a
butchery by one of their very own?
One remaining sibling whom fate
spared when he ran in terror from
his brother might shed light on
the general conjecture of the horror
that unfolded when the youngest of
four garroted their mother, shot
a bolt from a cross-bow into the
neck of one of his older brothers
and jammed another into yet another
brother's throat; the survivor saved
his own life by fleeing the grotesque
scene of familicide. Leaving friends
and neighbours to shudder in stark
disbelief and police to take official
charge of the slaughterhouse a family
home had become and the offerings
of those who knew the killer, now in
custody in stunned statements that
his impending marriage and fiance
are now a shattered dream of normalcy
the compulsion to destroy and kill
the actions of a demented stranger
not the well-adjusted man they know
and whose temperament had been
somehow overtaken by a demon.