The Hunt

By Lila Sharp & Nadine Matthews

Discussed: Fictional Murder, Graphic Details

This flash fiction piece brings us sixteen-year-old Carrie, who is bright, brilliant, and ambitious. Carrie is also sweet, kind, and loving. Why then, is Carrie sitting in jail accused of mass homicide?

On August 24th, 2020, Dr. Basek interviewed mass murderer Carrie Solend regarding the brutal slaying of her classmates.

Why did you do it? How did they make you so angry?

Well for starters, they were all jerks. Started out small enough: rude remarks in the hallways, tripping me, throwing out my lunch. Soon it progressed to them ruining my grades. They jumped me multiple times. One of them found out my address and trashed my house, leaving roadkill and garbage on my front step. I didn’t even feel safe in my own fucking home.

I don’t know the real reason why. They said different things: I was a freak, I was ugly, I was too poor, gross, dumb and weird. I existed too much, enough to be offensive to them. 

You know one of them tried to kill me once? This guy, Johnny, I’m pretty sure he’s the one I disemboweled, thought it’d be funny to try and push me in front of a train. Hilarious, right? You know the type, too: comes from money, handed everything he ever wanted. Of course he’d be the one to try to do it.

There’s… a certain entitlement needed to kill someone. The act of taking another human’s life: to erase them from this world, from its beauty and coarseness and hardship, to take away their joy and sorrow, love and hate and divinity, forever. You gotta feel like you deserve to do it. Somehow, he did.

But you think you’re different from him? That you’re not entitled?

I’m not saying that, but we are different. He acted that way out of cruelty; I did it for revenge. To be free.

Carrie, teenage girls don’t generally commit mass murder on their own. I’ll ask you again, did you do this by yourself?

Yeah. I’m almost fucking proud of it, y’know? There were, what, six of them there? And it wasn’t even hard. So blinded by their fucking arrogance and power, they didn’t even notice themselves getting lured to their untimely deaths.

Your father is currently in prison himself. Did growing up with such an unstable parental figure influence you?

Maybe, but not for whatever Freudian bullshit reason you think. He’s a man’s man. Y’know, those guys who fish and hunt and stuff for fun. One of the first things he taught me was how to field dress and skin a deer, and we spent almost every weekend hunting. Whenever he was around, I mean.

Because of him, I learned I could go up against an animal twice my size and win. I realized I could fight back with everything I had. Because of him, I could bring down the fucking beasts.

What were you feeling right after, Carrie? What did you feel in the immediate aftermath, when you saw the result of what you’d done?

I wished I hadn’t gotten blood everywhere. It would’ve been easier to clean up otherwise. 

I remember looking at them; I could see that same dread, that intoxicating fear. Their eyes still pleaded with me to let them live. Well, those of them who still had eyes. 

Those first few minutes, god, they were insane. It took a while to come down from the adrenaline high.

Okay so am I right in hearing that you felt a sort of exhilaration? Because of the fear you saw them experiencing?

It wasn’t so much because of the fear. It was… just finally letting everything out. 

People think they can push you around and if you don’t do anything at first, they can keep doing it. Especially with girls. People do whatever the fuck they want and they expect us to just sit there quietly and take it and then apologize for being there in the first place. They don’t think it adds up. It does. This anger, this gut-wrenching, soul-crushing rage slowly, just, builds and spreads until it’s all you can feel.

There’s catharsis in acting on that rage. There’s the storm after the calm, and then the calm again after that. 

Sure, I knew it wasn’t technically the most moral thing to do, and I did have to think about that a bit. But in those moments when it happened, and I held their lives in my hands like they were the tiny, fragile eggs my dad and I would find hunting, it didn’t matter. When I was finally in control, and they knew it, it didn’t matter. They had it coming …They had it coming. 

So, no empathy for their suffering?

You wanna talk about empathy? I’m the enforcer of empathy. When I was there, in that room with them, I made sure that they could feel everything they did to me.

Sure, there were parts of me saying not to do it. You know, there’s that big argument: revenge doesn’t make anything better. It only keeps the pain going, ’round and ’round. Forever, probably, but I’m okay with that. They deserved that, for every time they hurt me.

Still, I can see their eyes, their expressions. The fear and despair lingers. It’s still going, ’round and ’round.

Process

The genesis of the project was a piece of flash fiction written by Lila Sharp, combined with Nadine’s enthusiasm for true crime and podcasts. We decided it would be interesting to combine the two…