Breaking Mother's Back
an excerpt

Soup
First of all, it needs to be understood that, like Old Marley, Spanik was dead. Dead as a doorknob, dead as a trout, dead as the guy who was in the box and buried these past seven years, though in Spanik's case, it was just under a year. He was, motherless and nearly forgotten, and in those immortal words of that peculiar Munchkin mortician, he was really quite sincerely dead.

When he was living, he was a fractured gear in a partially functional machine. He managed to do his job, though not well, for eleven years. And he sat, and thought of how things might have been better if he did this, or didn't do that, and he added up his columns and clipped his calculator tapes to his calculation records and sent them to file. He was evaluated by his supervisor every month, and generally managed to meet the standards set for him by the Quality and Reporting Department, and that was quite enough for Spanik. His supervisor never knew that Spanik had murdered his ancient mother immediately prior to beginning work at the Large and Faceless Company. He hit her on the head with an empty Lucky Vodka jug, which she had drained dry in record time. She had a great deal of practice in jug draining. “The elderly,” Spanik thought, “should not often drink, and never to excess.” Puritanism came easily to him. He enjoyed judging the foibles of others, and found himself remarkably pristine.

So, Spanik bashed his dear mother on the noggin as she lay, in a stain of her own fecal matter in her decaying bed in her decaying bedroom. He was sick and tired of cleaning that particular stain, and figured that it was time that old mum go straight to Hell and meet her maker. He helped her along.

Then he got rid of the body, got a job, did it crappily for a bit over a decade, died and was pretty well forgotten. After all that, our story begins.