There is a monotony to life, subtle in the ways it hides from view with the fallacies of progress. But nothing truly comes, and I think I fully expected and maybe even enjoyed the lack of change. There’s a strange confidence with the knowledge that every day comes at no expense of the last.
But no more could I be assured that time is forever, as the simple hiding of the most temporary idea possible is a failing act.
I what I am: a simple man whose life’s fate I can only determine with an amount barely higher than a fraction. There are people above me, and people below me, but there is no physical distance between each other, including for the man that came abroad to me that one day.
That day will forever clash against the residence of my own mind, fighting my own systems of common sense. He is still out there, roaming in our heads like a snake encased amongst the shelled casings of our own minds, though I shouldn’t even be surprised at his ability of freedom in the terms of death, as death was intended to be eternal.
My position of a working man held me up in the shelf of a convenience store register, holing up the words of my loved ones, ignoring their bickers for me to stay by them, or at the very least pursue a career that comes with a pride of going above the medium of average skill.
But my ears were blocked off with the salinity of my own thinking, as I just progressed within the store a position of manager. If I were to pursue anything but what I’ve sewn with the stitches of my waste of time, I would be back to the block of nothing. I would be fresh in the matters of knowledge, charisma and energy tanking with the capacity to learn anew.
So I stayed behind the position of hierarchy, 12 hours in the world’s set of 24 hours, including the overtime to feed my own stomach: a growing parasite of my savings as the arbitrary pricing of necessary objects grew alongside it.
I was holed up in the back of the store, occupied by the seemingly impossible trade of exchanging currency, a profession of speech and mannerisms to perfectly suit expectations. Boxes strewn about in vain attempt to organize chaos, my office a small tumor of space in such a room. I sat infront of my desk for what seemed like hours, treading the eternal talk of submersed anger.
One of my clients recently opposed the pricing of our food staying mostly the same, arguing that they couldn’t afford losses in such regards. But our store was simple, small even compared to the titans of industry. I bickered without end, insisting that our establishment was too feeble and needed to hold up the expectation of being so.
But they never let go of their thinking.
I was awaiting another call of their reluctance when the door to my cluttered domain swung open.
“A customer needs help at register 3. “
Looking down upon my tired being was a messy-haired boy barely old enough to suture himself the simple career of an unfulfilling job. His emotion held only the unchanging face of boredom and a strange tinge of anxiety.
“Tell them I’m busy. “
“Sir, the man is adamant about his calling of you. “
“What does he even want? “
“Wants an interrogation with somebody who, and I quote, ‘ has seen justice before’. “
The boy shook his head in an utterance of his own lack of understanding, correlating to an emotion nearing the edge of fear.
“He says he’s important. Never did he say why, nor did he ever stop the calm tone of his voice, not even after Jessica hollered at him to leave. Sir, he’s been hogging up the line for about 10 minutes now. “
“What line? “
“1 person now, sir. That’s why I’ve gone up to you now. “
I looked back at the silent phone between my hands. Lurking everywhere was a feeling of reluctant clenching, bracing for an unknown event to come dance across the rims of the room, dread piling up in the stillness of everything, as if we were waiting out the lurking presence of danger, but it forever would stare at us, waiting in a prominent standing as I jumped up from my lousy chair of stain-filled fabric and swept away the boy as to create an aperture between me and the man.
It was only a brisk walk, breath moving slowly between my lungs, but still I couldn’t help but sweat my brows a bit when I gazed the man at the counter.
He was no longer waiting in line, now he played the part of a worker as he sorted the buttons upon the register’s surface. His long and rugged hair blocked the lineaments of the figure resembling a normal face plastered at the front of his head.
“Keep your hands off of the register. “
I now stood facing him, a fixated look of drowning feeling being shared between us as I played the part of a man with skill laced to be nothing but humanity’s inherent ability to gain from simple transactions.
“Just looking through the exchanges, sir. “
It was a simple tone, a calm and collected voice created in a deceiving chant, likely able to appease even the most grudge-filled titans of industry. He now swiftly lurched his head upward, face filled in with nothing but the treacherous void of understanding that was his unmoving lip, parted only in the breaths of his speech. The synapses of his face trudged in large crevices, but still he looked somehow young. A rugged tear smeared the ridges of his hair, but it did not distract from his apparent, careful demeanor.
“You can’t do that; you’re a customer. “
“What is a customer in your eyes? What differentiates you from me, enough of a difference in your mind to create a barrier between exchanges? Would my lying words soothe your psyche if I simply masked the appearence of an investigator pertaining to an unknown, higher organization? Or would it instill fear? “
“Who do you think you are? “
He didn’t answer my question, instead reaching a swift hand to swing open the register door.
“Step away from the register! I’ve called the cops and they’re on their way! “
In his hands lay a single penny now, a form of barter useless in this era. In one movement he slammed the door closed and arched the penny forward, hand gripped lightly across the edge of its rotund surface.
“The law cannot contain my reaching limb across this coin in the first place. The law could arrive soon, but that is just another grasp at failing logic barely able to comfort the vulnerable, as I would have already taken this coin and flipped it upside down, and nothing could revive the faults of the past. “
He slammed the coin, indeed he flipped the coin without even the knowledge of any sort of justice. The viewing of the coin was blocked with his slender hand, certainty fleeting against the possibilities that could arrive in the near future of a single moment or two. Mindless fear struck me as we stared over each other’s faces, I in vain attempt at understanding, he looking through my transparent being.
“You want me to bet on the deal of a coin flip, a deal already set into motion? “
I spoke in revenants of sound, reverberating across my throat and the air, but somehow confident in the unreliable belief that I could at least get through to him.
“There’s a reason I flipped this coin, a reason in scale beyond even I. The equations I follow may seem arbitrary, but the actions that stem from such systems lead to the progression of my movements. I doubt anything would change if I were simply never predetermined in fate.
“Now call your own fate, as the coin has already been flipped, and nothing can stop it from revealing itself. “
As he finished his last sentence a slender pair of arms lunged at his chest, pushing away his entire being, the coin failing away into an uncertain crevice.
The boy now held up his hands again for a swing of balanced wrath.
His hands abruptly looped themselves down as his stomach churned over his entire body as the man kicked with a force barely winded up, as if he trained a million years to spare against this threat, feeble in comparison to him.
In barely a second a black object revealed itself from the man’s belt, unnoticed by my dreadful glances at him.
The boy held up his hands again, this time reaching in defense of his own face.
The man shot him in the throat.
People scrambled for the exit, none of them clambering to take over the killer infront of me. I stood in shaky breaths, dazed by the sudden and forceful exit of life.
The man fled in a tranquil breeze of the legs, paying only the ground his faithful vision. No sign of the hand of justice drew anywhere close, fear for all piling up at the uncertainty of the near future now dreamt to be of even more tragedy.
But the man only walked, pacing across the store in succession of what should have been thought, but likely he ignored all the sparking treading of his own brain, movements shallow in the way he seemed almost bored when his body was splayed with blood.
He was almost to the exit when his piercing glare paid a visit to my body shrinking in uncontrollable yet warranted panic.
He stared with eyes dead as the boy barely a couple feet away from me.
He held the weapon by his side, but it was apparent that his intent of further killing was miles away.
He raised up his other outstretched hand, somehow displaying the penny in its grasp, its direction of a surface indiscernible.
The hand of so-called justice interrogated me for hours, asking for the precious information of the man that they somehow let leak away from their malfunctioning system. When they questioned me, they seemed as if they placed guilt upon my consciousness, asking why I stayed still against the face of death.
They asked why I erased most memory of his faithful appearance from my pained mind.
They asked why I held in the store only broken cameras, ignoring my pleas that I couldn’t afford to fix them.
They asked why I cried at what should have been just some questions, words of examination against what was to them just another visit of death, but to me it was as if I were falling back into the moment of his slaying in every word I spoke of him.
Days had gone and the only sight that remained was my house, a simple domain residing in the outskirts of town, a reality enclosed for only me. Another repetitive day of nothing seeped into the growing pile of time, all collapsing after the slaying took away my job and even status.
They all blamed me for having been oppressed by an entity they’ve taught to ignore, to let fester in the corner of reality and decay the values they say were also eternal. The purgatory they hold up falters, same as I when I heard a faint sound breaching the inside of my home.
It was barely a simple creak of a boot, but its impact upon my mind made all the moments of my life stagger one other in a manic succession of the flowing river that is thought. It was the crest of the sound, emanating from my corner of a living room thought to be a reliable safe space, that made the thought of failure rise high.
Dozens of years of life and all that came to me was a mindless carrier of death, purging the innocent in a march of controlled randomness.
Though I trembled in every step reaching my bedroom door, fear didn’t reside in me anymore, fear a manipulated construct by their hands. I no longer hoped for the purgatory they held up, instead reaching for the turn of a handle that is the deathly wisdom of a killer bestowed in bloody paths.
Quiet encapsulated everything in one shimmer of a moment, seething the painful agony of listening for the whisper of death.
But I didn’t hear anything, my mind no longer warned by the sound that had alerted me to reality, as if the memory of such a thing were to be foolish.
Countless possibilities could have made up that sound, none of them remotely resembling that of a pain more than a simple glance of labor. I could have even made the decibels up in the everlasting reverberation that is a human mind, churning out the distorted whimpers of what should be reality.
Another faint creak of the rotting wood of my living room chair flung my senses back into the fallacy of survival once again, my limbs moving forwards in a response not dictated by myself anymore.
The short walkway to my living room was now the distance between me and death, a fine line of crossing. In the short temporal-focused beating of my heart shone only what could become, a faint future of life ahead if not for this thing in my domain. Death would have not come for me if fate was simply different, even in the distance of time that is the flip of a second.
But then I heard his calling and culling.
“Nothing has changed. The multiplied life of a path that nature has gifted you, and this what you turn to? “
The voice boomed audibly and horribly, yet soothing in the nihilistic meaning it placed upon the uncertain world I’ve sown into.
“What is nature? “
“There is nothing more chaotic than nature, but still I could measure it. With the vast reaches that humanity has breached, the systemic stem of life can be thoroughly put into a microscope, the infinite possibilities confined into only millions.
“Nature has a mind, a brain of thinking beyond good and evil. Death comes swiftly and seemingly without reason, but that reason can be assured if you simply listen to the beating of your own heart. What has fueled the blood of your being? Only the matter of precious seconds, determined millennia ago. “
I spoke again, now in a hoarse yell of my own uselessness.
“You don’t make any sense. “
“I make sense to me, and that sense only comes from my staying here: my ability to shed blood. “
“You can’t kill forever; nothing assures you’re forever safe. The boy still pushed you away from your own understanding, isn’t that enough for a retread of your own thinking? “
I heard a clatter of a gun against fabric, him likely reaching for the dreadful figure of a shotgun.
“I would have quit so long ago if not for the understanding that chaos is unforgiving. I don’t get anything for this, but neither do I lose anything for this, for the flip of a coin adds luck upon each other in every second that passes. “
A sound of shifting fabric moved around another speech in him.
“Call it: the side of your fate lying under my hand. “
Tremors spread across the imbecile figure of a body, unmoving in the ability to think, unwilling to change in my own ideals.
“I don’t want to. “
“Nobody wants to face the barrel of death, but they all want the moving river of change, for every breath is another flip of the coin. “
I breathed in again.
“You don’t follow any system; it’s just you who pulls the final button of a trigger. A series of your steps have led you here, but that chair of yours in mine, and everything else under this roof is from my own shell of sweat. You are nothing but a leech of what should have been normalcy, instead the brooding dementia of life.
“You are unhappy with every action you take, but I was never saddened by even my own beliefs. “
The sound of his leap: cushion fattening up for another embrace, the sturdy hurdle of a shotgun also leaping up, and the booming explosion of death, flooded up my ears in the blackening of my own eyes from my own will.
My father told me I was special, intended for the virtruce of change, but he himself died years later, his corpse having done nothing but feed the worms of industry festered in the ground. Though he did nothing, he still serves a memory of specialty in the way he met death.Others have told that he met death one day at the sheriff’s office while he was out to barter my mother’s speeding ticket, given because of racial disputes, slaying him and everybody else at the department. I don’t believe he could have actually done anything against such towering evils before him, almost intending to die by his own hands. But what did the man say? That fate is uncontrollable, inevitable?Despite this, others have congratulated me for the oppression of a paragon of true evil, cheers of pride flooding in to greet me in what should have been my victory. But the man was the only victor, for in the end there lied only the blood of his own barrel, the words groomed by his own system, and the shell casing of metal that was his own fate.