I, Ripper

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When I cut the woman’s throat, her eyes betrayed not pain, not fear, but utter confusion. Truly, no creature can understand its own obliteration. Our expectation of death is real but highly theoretical until the moment is upon us and so it was with her.

She knew me but she didn’t know me. I was of a type, and having survived on the streets for years, she’d cultivated the gift of reading for threat or profit, deciding in a second and then acting accordingly. I knew in an instant I’d passed beyond the adjudication and represented, in her narrow rat brain of what once was a mind, the profit, not the threat. She watched me approach, along a dark street that had subtended from a larger thoroughfare, with a kind of expectant resignation. She had no reason to fear, not because violence was rare here in Whitechapel (it was not), but because it was almost always affiliated with robbery, as strong-armed gang members from the Bessarabians or the Hoxton High Rips struck a woman down, yanked her purse free, and dashed away. Crime, for the working population of the streets, meant a snatch-purse with a cosh, and he would be some kind of brute, a sailor most likely, or a large Jew, German, or Irish Paddy with a face like squashed potato. I had none of these defining characteristics but appeared to be some member of a higher order, to suggest service in a household or some low retail position. I even had a smile, so composed was I, and she returned that smile in the dimness of a crescent moon and a far-off gaslight.

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