(This is a confession I made with a priest. I was in a very dark place at this time and it felt as though I was fighting for my life each day just to survive a prison sentence.)
I’ll skip the preamble: the slow hesitant lurch to the church (Early in the morning as my mind wouldn’t let me sleep and my bed felt like sleeping on rusty sheet metal); the cackling, coaxing voices from behind bars of iron.
I’ll try and stick to the bare essentials.
Father: you want to be confess something to me?
I do, I said, speaking through a stutter that I’d developed ever since the night it happened.
Father: don’t be scared. You don’t need to be anxious with me. You’re speaking to god now.
Al… alright.
The night it happened:
I was walking home late at night, Reading a book on my phone (a horror ironically). I was rounding a corner, just a few minutes from my house, when I saw him. In my distracted state I might have dismissed it as some false shadow but shadows don’t beg or scream.
Give me your money, he said with a voice that sounded sharp and corrupted.
“De…. I… eh..”
“Give me your fucking money”
“I don’t ha… I only have my my card”
“Give me whatever. I’ll hurt you terribly”
I was just lost. What the this was happening to me. No it couldnt have been. Nothing about any of this felt real. A friend of mine told me only a few weeks before about how this very thing happened to him; how his nose was ruined by a piece of scum like this.
That’s what had lead me to making that ultimate purchase. I didn’t want it to happen like… like it did.
I felt sort of necessary to own a knife.
“Hurry the fuck up and give me that fucking card” and with that he started feeling around his pocket for something.
Before I completely knew what I was doing I let my wallet fall to the ground. I quickly dove down to get it and, before the guy could protest, I shot up and drilled my pocketbook knife into his throat.
I… I…
Father: take a breathe. I’m his is all very , uh, very traumatic for you.
Father, I said, I need you to believe me when i sat that I hate myself for what i did. He was scum but I still wear his scum bag blood everyday.
I stepped back from him and he stepped back from me; both of us shocked by this turn of events. He began to splutter blood from his mouth and the night made it look so much more like silver.
He started scratching freakishly at the silvery thing embedded in him and then, as if that timer of shock stopped ticking for him, he broke into loud raking sobs.
I still wonder how much sympathy I had or have for the man, but I know his sounds of pain will always be with me.
Father: em.. the knife… what happened to the knife?
The moment, father, there’s so much you assume about yourself in the moment? But those assumptions are fleeting things when it counts; the moment swallows it all up.
I reached for that knife. He looked at me with these big pleading, possessive eyes, as if I was the thief. I pulled and pulled this sharp tooth from its bleeding gums. I just didn’t care.
I’ve fallen onto the floor i think and in one bloody hand is the knife.
I’m running. I’m running from that wretched man and it’s almost like his, uh, pained howls are running after me.
Father: what did you do then?
I dropped the knife somewhere. I hope a child didn’t find it. That would just make things worse.
Then I went to the police station. I’ve been told that I couldn’t stop crying. I don’t think ive since stopped.
When I was told they would be arresting me under suspicion of murder I fell to my knees and started screaming for my girlfriend, for my dad, for my mom… for my god.
The father went as if to say something, this is always how it ended.
I made to get up and was stopped.
Father: I see you’re frustrated, son, but try and not lose hope. Yours is a complicated case
I left soundlessly back towards my cell. With each leering face from the cells i saw his face.
With each passing face I searched in my pocket for the knife