John Vanderhoef

Tourniquet John Vanderhoef

Your father's murdered in his office, a girl has been kidnapped, her voice box removed, drowning every time you're forced to complete another job for her psychotic abductors, or she's starving, her soulless captors refusing to feed her, she's shivering in a freezer somewhere, left to congeal, or she's burning in a tin box, under the sun, boiling like a skinned chicken, trapped and waiting, always waiting. Her life is perpetually at stake. She's incentive; she's a reason to obey. She's not even human anymore. She's a breathing obligation. She's your best friend's sister and you think you love her, but you don't understand the word love, because all you can feel, all you can sense, is antipathy lingering around your lifeless, yet animated cadaver, a slave to misanthropists, a confused fragile frame, caught between conflicting philosophies of freedom and despair. She's lost her liberty, you've lost your mind, and her brother, your best friend, has lost his ability to rationalize. Tourniquet, a morbid love story of freewill, responsibility, suffering, and anguish, a world where nothing matters, a world where everything is at stake, a hopeless, desolate world where everybody's missing something, and human tenderness festers on the crushed wings of houseflies.