Teil 3
**The Liberation of the Spirit** – Teil 3 (Abschluss)

She pulled and thrust, further and further, an automaton-like executor of her own will. The blade approached the pubic bone. Just before it reached it, with one last, brutal jerk, she severed something that triggered a sudden, violent gush of a clear, warm liquid, which spurted down her thighs and onto the floor.

*Ssssssssch—*

It wasn’t blood. It was urine. She had ruptured her bladder. The sharp, characteristic smell of urine mingled with the already hellish scent. The liquid ran hot down her legs, mixing with the blood and intestinal secretions. A final humiliation, a last surrender of control.

The knife couldn’t go any further. The handle struck her pubic bone. The vertical cut was complete. A gaping wound about thirty centimeters long stretched from her upper abdomen down to her pubic area. Her abdominal wall hung apart in two large, bloody flaps.

Exposed in the cavity lay a large portion of her digestive tract: liver, stomach, a tangle of small intestine loops, the beginning of the large intestine, all covered by a shiny film of blood and serous fluids, all still warm and alive with a sluggish, peristaltic twitch.

Andrea dropped the knife. It clattered to the floor. Her arms fell limply at her sides. She was at the end of her strength. The blood loss was enormous. A cold shiver ran over her, starting in her fingers and toes and creeping inward. The throbbing pain began to subside, replaced by a numbing, heavy numbness. She was exhausted, empty, but also… fulfilled.

Her gaze, cloudy and fading, wandered over the panorama of her own entrails. Then she looked over at the piece of intestine that Monika had torn out and that lay on the floor beside her. The final agreement. The final act.

In a movement that was more instinct than will, her trembling, blood-smeared hand reached for one of the warm, slippery loops of small intestine oozing from her own wound. She clasped the moist, smooth tissue. It felt like a warm, living tube. With a final effort, she pulled out a section about twenty centimeters long, not tearing it off, but severing it from its connections with a blunt, crushing tug. *Rip.*

She held the piece of her own small intestine in her hand. It was pale pink, translucent, with fine blood vessels beneath. It smelled intensely of itself, of intestine, of life.

She brought it to her mouth.

Her teeth closed on her own tissue. The taste was overwhelming, strange and familiar at the same time. Salty, metallic (from the blood), with a subtle, unmistakable sweetness and an undertone of something fundamentally organic, almost earthy. The texture was tough, rubbery; she had to chew, tear. It was not food. It was a communion. The ultimate autophagy. She was eating a piece of her own soul, of the seat of her life, as she had believed it to be.

As she chewed, her upper body slowly slumped forward. The cold spread through her chest. Her gaze went blank. The last thing she saw was the jumbled, colorful pattern of her own and Monika’s entrails on the dark parquet floor, mingled into a single, hideous, and yet somehow beautiful work of art of liberation.

Then it was all over for Andrea, too. The silence that fell over the room was now absolute, broken only by the soft dripping of fluid from the edge of the bloody pool onto the floor.

The snuff officer waited a few more minutes, then performed the same quick pulse check on both women. He noted the time in his logbook. His work was done. He collected the two signed contracts and put them in his briefcase. He left the bloody tanto where it lay; it belonged to the clients and would be disposed of with the bodies.

He put on his trench coat, cast a final, indifferent glance at the scene of the double evisceration, at the two young women who had slumped in the midst of their own exposed innards. Outside, the November rain lashed unabated against the window.

“Mission accomplished,” he muttered to himself and left the apartment, letting the door fall quietly shut. Behind him remained only the silent, stinking truth of the flesh, freed from the illusions of the mind, in a world that had long since ceased to ask for meaning.

**Ende der Geschichte**