The Gorko Gazette

A Woman of Distinction

Do I kill often? No, not often.

(Do me a favor, stop touching that window, it doesn’t open, and it doesn’t even go anywhere.) 

I don’t need to kill often, and I don’t do things I don’t need to do, unless I’m paid to. Once every two months is enough; killing once every two months works just fine.

(You can stop crying; the walls are soundproofed.)

A rate of six slayings-per-annum is a frequency sufficient to regenerate my dying cells, purge the cancerous ones, slough off aging flesh—and then I’m young again. Well, physically.

(Quit trying that door, it’s not like there’s anything but the forest out there.)

To be young-at-heart is as much perspective as it is smooth skin and gravity-resistant breasts.

(It’s very nice that you want to apologize now, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t credit it as genuine, given the circumstances. No, I won’t be letting you go.) 

I would have to regather the suppositions of youth to be young-at-heart. Being five-hundred years old, I’m as capable of regaining the perspective of my youth as I am of becoming a hamster. I grew up in the Rhineland at the dawn of the sixteenth century; Malleus Maleficerum was at the top of the bestseller list and people thought Jews controlled the weather! (Okay, so in some ways, not so much has changed.) Dowries still included livestock. Marriage still included dowries!

(By the way, the tea and cookies over on that table bolted to the floor are for you. But if you have any reasonable last requests, I’ll consider them. The operative word, again, is “reasonable”.)

I could no more again be young-at-heart than I could be a hamster.

(Yes, I know, it’s very good tea. No, I don’t want to see a picture of your mother.)

You must believe me—and I mean this, really, I do—that I don’t enjoy killing.

But if I’m supposed to finish the book I’ve been writing for the last two-hundred years, I still need to live a little bit longer.

(I’m just being a good hostess. Killing you doesn’t mean I have to be impolite beforehand.)

What’s the book about? Well, it’s what you might call “conduct literature”. Think of a modern version of Tannhäuser’s Book of Manners, or Book of the Civilized Man by Daniel of Beccles.

You see, I’ve spent a half-millennium dealing with snotty little shits who spill their beers on my cocktail dress and then laugh about it with their friends like donkeys. My book would educate the vulgarians, the hooligans, the philistines. It would warn them that gentlemanliness can safeguard their physical safety.

I think I’m going to call it How Being Rude Can Get You Killed. I’d let you read it, but you won’t be around.

(Yes, you’re going to be in the book.)

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Image by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’