I sat staring at the blood stain for a long time. It looked like a black star on the white wall as it congealed. The black bullet hole in the center of its jagged form was its heart. There were a few small chunks of brain and fragments of skull sticking there. The larger pieces had been seduced by gravity and rolled lazily down the wall, creating starbeams. I followed the beams downward and looked at the man's body. His head was right against the wall, and his glassy, unmoving eyes stared up a the ceiling with extreme interest. His mouth was wide open, and I could see the fractured, uneven crescent of his upper teeth. The bullet had shattered his palate.

I hadn't really planned on shooting my landlord. It was just one of those things. He just got me mad, threatening to evict. The rest was easy. The gun in his mouth. The thrill of seeing his eyes bulging with terror. Bang. The smell of sulfur. He slid down the wall, leaving a red starburst behind. Then I kind of slipped into some kind of hypnotic stupor, crouching in a corner, staring at the newborn star. I had always fancied myself as a bit artistic, but until now I was never really inspired. This star, however, was beautiful, and I knew how to make it better.

I must have been staring at that damn thing for at least a half hour because when I stood up, my knees were badly cramped. I walked stiffly into my kitchen and got the biggest steak knife I could find. I came back out and stood over the body for a moment, deciding where I was going to begin. Then I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

The first thing I went for were his eyes. I pulled back his frozen eyelids and tried to slide the knife between the skull and eye. The eye rolled comically toward the blade as I pressed it into the flesh as if saying "Hey! What are you doing?" I smiled to myself as I began to saw at the muscles and tissue. Then a jet of salty liquid sprayed my lips and I saw the eye deflate. I had wanted to extract it intact. I stopped and looked at the eye for about a minute. It looked more like a raisin than an eyeball. With a shrug, I dug my fingers into the eye socked and pulled at the warm, slimy tissue. With a few hard yanks, the eye and its muscle came free. I looked into the red, empty eye socket. Much better.

Then I started at the center of his forehead and sawed at the flesh down to his upper lip and back to the jagged hole in the back of his head. Then I began peeling the flesh away, revealing the true nakedness of half of his face for the world to see. Near the upper jaw, a few broken fragments pulled off with the skin, so I had to rip them off and place them back as well as I could. Then I sawed through the center of his chin and a bit through his throat, just to make it look even.

After I had ripped muscle and skin free from their moorings on the bone, I stood back and looked at my work. Half of his face was the same as before. On the other side, the naked skull and an empty eye socket stared back at me. I considered getting a towel and wiping all the residual blood from the skull, but I decided that white skulls were cliched.

Then came the hard part. I had to saw each rib free of the sternum and then pry it back with my foot. Ribs sound like wood when they break. It was messy, but how else was I going to get the main organs of the body? After I had worked up a fair sweat by sawing, tearing and cracking, I finally twisted the sternum free and saw the essence of humanity.

His lungs, blackened and a bit leathery from years of smoking, came out fairly easily, although they were heavier than I'd expected. All I really did with them was spread them out, making them look like perverse vestiges of wings. I wasn't really sure what to do with heart (it was pretty small--big surprise) so I left it where it was.

Then I cut through his beer gut and flopped the big mass of greasy, yellow fat over his crotch. No need to reveal everything. The liver posed an interesting problem. It wasn't symmetrical and it wouldn't move unless I completely cut it free. I carried the slippery organ down to his feet and dropped it on the floor. I decided that it would symbolize how people ruin their livers by drinking...or something like that.

The last part was the intestinal tract. I unraveled the worm-like mass and spread it out around his body like some kind of halo or something. A stiff, lumpy part of the intestine told me how far his last meal had gotten. I ignored the pancreas an a few other organs I could not identify.

After about an hour's work, I stepped back, covered in lukewarm blood and bodily fluids to look at what I'd done. It looked beautiful, glistening in the light of a streetlamp. The room had a warm, coppery smell to it. Of course, I wasn't perfect yet. I'd need some better cutting equipment and next time I would be more careful about where I shot them.

I think I should write an instruction manual on it, so that others can practice my art.