Let’s say
you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter
winter
day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man
was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re
the one who shot him. He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny
skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his
tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs, you know the type.
And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight
bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to
spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your
face. On the follow-through of the last swing, though, the handle
of the ax snaps in a spray of splinters. You now have a broken
ax. So, after a long night of looking for a place to dump the man
and his head, you take a trip into town with your ax. You go to
the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on
the broken handle as barbecue sauce. You walk out with a brand
new handle for your ax. The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your
garage until the next spring when, on one rainy morning, you find
in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug
with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your
forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab
your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the
last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned
kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the
blade. Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the
hardware store. They sell you a brand new head for your ax. As
soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet
the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He’s
also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic
weed trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression
of “you’re the man who killed me last winter”
resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life. You
brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with
his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams,
“That’s the same ax that slayed me!”
Is he right?