The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

her habit of throwing jeans, sweaters, underpants, empty bottles, ashtrays, and pizza boxes around the house, finally get on my nerves. I may be a sociopath, but I like my place in order.
    “I just don’t fucking understand how you can be the daughter of your parents. I mean, their house is like the White House while yours is a complete Shit House.”
    “OK, so let’s get some house help.”
    “We already talked about that. We can’t afford it.”
    “We don’t have to. You just kill her after she’s finished her first cleaning. And then we hire another one, and you kill her as well. I mean, you’re a fucking professional aren’t you?”
    This is how all our arguments end. My ex-job is always there, like some psycho ex-girlfriend. When you’ve killed more than a hundred people, you have no right to complain about a dirty floor or a messy room. That’s just the way it is. She’s almost made it into an art. Every time she finds herself in a corner, she bursts out with: “You’re probably more used to dealing with dead people, aren’t you?” or “You can’t stand people who do boring things like breathing and talking, can you?” or simply “Why don’t you just kill me?”
    Apart from that things are OK.
    We go to our jobs and then team up for dinner before I drag her with me to see the latest Spiderman movie, or I let her drag me to one of the countless concerts this small city has to offer. I must have quite a crush on her for I don’t mind standing for two whole hours, nodding to worthless indie bands like Earplugs and The Sleeping Pills, while Creed plays inside my head to the fire-blooming invasion of Knin.
    The only real downer is Truster, who doesn’t seem to be even searching for a place to live. His silent presence can easily break your brand new self to pieces and allow the old one to shine through. For the first two weeks, he used no more than two fucking words. “Hi” and “bye.” When I hand him his fucking dinner, a killer of a goulash that I held in my lap for some twenty minutes on a bus full of rainmen and rape victims, he doesn’t even say a single “takk. ” Luckily he’s at work most of the time. One of the Seven Elevens recently worked with Truster on a construction site. Apparently the silent bird is a star in the concrete world.
    “Is genius with crane. From hundred meter can pick up small money, in very big wind.”
    Well, good for him. If he only could use his crane to pick up girls…
    I manage to keep my demons at the door, but at night they come creeping through our bedroom window. Gunnhildur prefers to leave it open.
    As soon as I fall asleep, the Serbian tanks come rolling in, with treads made of screaming heads—the bloodied and muddied heads of Croatian villagers, old men, women, and children. The Chetnik panzers break through my sleeping defense, speeding across the dark fields of my soul like worked-up rhinos, followed by a platoon of sixty-six American businessmen, armed with cell phones and briefcases, who’re being cheered on by an equal number of widows, yelling out all the way from the deep blue forests of New Jersey to the flat hot roofs of the Manitoban prairie, the whole of it backed by the blessing of a bald priest with a Southern accent dressed in a white karate outfit, sporting a black Bulgarian belt marked: YO BITCH!
    They attack us from all sides. They’ve surrounded us: me, my dad, and Dario.
    We work our fingers off on the machine guns, turning our small fort into a sprinkler of bullets, but to no avail. We’re overwhelmed. Pretty soon we can hear the horrible shrieks of our own women and children, rolling with the caterpillar tread of the fast approaching tanks, through the super-loud gun sounds.
    I suddenly sense that my father is wounded. He’s been shot in the right shoulder. I look behind me and watch him turn slowly towards me. But I can’t do anything about it, for I have to face the enemy, I have to continue shooting. But a second later I can feel his hands on my neck, around my neck. He’s got his ten strong fingers around my neck. I feel he’s about to strangle me when I wake up and see Truster’s red face in the blue morning light that fills the bedroom.
    Truster is trying to strangle me. The fucker. I grab his arms and try pushing him away, but he’s strong as a rib-eyed bull. Gunnhildur wakes up and starts screaming his name. This weakens him enough so that I’m able to loosen his grip on my neck: soon we’re