To begin with, I did not need to murder the boy in the alley.

I could have beaten

him up and left it at that - but something urged me on, something quite impossible
to know what. Or even why. And intentions are easier conjectured than determined:
we project vices onto other people quickly and believe our conclusions as assuredly
as we have faith that the ground will not fall out and tear into pieces when we set
foot upon it.
But perhaps I am rationalizing. At any rate, it has been disturbing me. Haunting
me, one might say. Like a ghost, it peers upon me from the nooks and crannies. Only
now they are in my head, those ghosts.
I am reminded of the murder every time I lay eyes on a boy strutting through the
street: always, I see him, that boy I killed: that brown-eyed freak with the
ruffled, raven hair whose right eye was blind due to a vein popping or something
like that. He was beaten when he was a child. And perhaps I took pity on that, so I
ended the creature.
Ah, another rationalization. But I can't believe I am not innocent - I don't want
to believe I am not innocent. If ever I consider even the possibility that what I
did was morally wrong, degrading, and akin to the greatest evil that a man can
commit, always my stomach acids gurgle and the vomit rises within me as some geyser
from the depths of a jagged mountain.
I have taken to drinking because I want to forget. But even here, in the bar - in
point of fact, especially here - I see that boy, watching me from some corner.
Maybe it's a hallucination created by my unconscious mind, maybe it's a real ghost,
or maybe it's something else. But I am scared for my life and so I am writing this:
for writing allows me, even though it is short-lived, writing allows me some peace
from the wretched weight that I bear upon me. At the very least, solace finds me
here in my dusty apartment.

I shall start two weeks before the murder, for that is when the gears of fate, I
think, cranked to a start. And, truly, I blame Destiny for what happened.
The night, I remember, was dank. The vehicle screeched to a halt. I parked the car
and emerged into a sticky evening. All about there was the bitter smell of rotting
leaves and stagnant water.
The apartment I lived in had had a bad case of acid rain for quite a long time. And
only a few hours before, when I was still within the office, the rain pelted.
But all that to say, I think I may have imagined it, for I have been living here a
long time now and, surely, I should have gotten used to it. Perhaps, though, the
smell came stronger than usual: rotting, rotting, rotting. Yes, I remember. That's
what came to mind to me then.
The apartment door creaked open. I entered the low-ceiling guest room, shuffled
upstairs, and entered my room. 4102, if one should need to know. But it is not so
important a detail, I think. In fact, details are, to an extent, superfluous to
this story, for one should only remember what was intrinsic to the story, or,
should I say, important to a story. Unrelated facts are quite useless. Quite
useless.
The door, as I remember it, banged shut. I was angry then. Furious. I had gotten
laid off from my job. For what reason I didn't and still do not know why. But that
is why I am starting where I am starting - because I believe that Destiny, in
petrifying my life to a great halt, indeed, in destroying a once-set piece of my
life, well, it started me on the path of murder. Vengeance, I think. On another
with much potential and hope.
Venomous curses rippling from my tongue, I imagined shooting the boss and burning
the body. I grinned as I watched it in my mind's eye. It was so clear to me; it was
so beautiful to me: how his body, charred, blackened, and drenched in gasoline, I
would stand over; and, like a campfire, how the warmth would caress my skin,
fondling it as a mother fondles her child's curving cheeks; how, also, I would
shoot him again and again and again still, though he lay there more dead than most
who die.
But then, I came back to reality. And it was a very dreadful thing. Reality is
always a dreadful thing. You see, I did not even choose to be plucked from some
ginormous swath of potential and lickered with life; I did not choose to gallop
about life, with a heart that feels too greatly, and a mind that thinks too much; I
did not choose to be burdened with the burdens of a human being: his existential
dread; his anxieties; his sadnesses and joys; his feelings; his thoughts; his
motivations, impulses and drives; his ignorance; his thirsts; his hungers; his
pathetic nature;- I hate man to the core. I hate everything. Most of all, I hate
myself for being one of them.
And so, realizing that I should always be a failure, I decided to strip myself and
hunch in front of the computer. Spiderlike, my fingers reached below my navel. The
screen jittered blue, now flashing images. The groans tittilated me; the screams
joyfully terrified me; the seizing, clenching, groping, the snatching, fondling,
clutching - all of those forceful shoves pleasured me to such a degree that ecstasy
pervaded my body and I was at once everything and nothing at all - I had reached
whatever those Buddhists and Christians were searching for: Godhood.
Nevertheless, now that I can sit here and extricate myself from my past - or, at
least, the "I" before the death of the poor boy - now that I could remove myself
and analyze the situation calmly, coolly, disaffectedly, I now realize that this
propensity for self-pleasuring was only a marker of my as-of-then repressed power.
Yes, power. For had I not only watched but: learned - well! If I only...but that is
something to ponder for another day, when I am more willing to discuss those
things.
After that brief gaiety I once more fell into that dreadfulness - I felt inhuman,
pathetic, useless. But perhaps I was inhuman, pathetic and useless. I had nothing
to my name after all, during those days. And even now, I think, I am nothing,
nothing but a murderer.
But that moniker - it rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Murderer. Three syllables.
A vibration on the nose first; a rolling onto the back of the teeth; a hard wiggle
of the tongue; and then, as finale, one more of those teeth-wrenching sounds.
But what am I talking about? And why am I talking of this to you, anyways, whoever
you are? Why am I pouring my soul into this sieve that cannot hold me, that can
never hold me, that will not and can never know me without prejudices, assumptions,
presumptions. I have given up all relations with man because they shall never
understand how my innards boil with hatred; how, every time I see those people
gallivanting about with their lives of normalcy, how every time that happens, my
fists clench into a pale white and the knuckles then seem to extend like daggers,
and, when that happens, how I wish to stab them with that dagger, in the face,
until they bleed, until their faces are ruined, until everything that is of theirs
is stripped off them in the same way that everything of me has been uncloaked,
untethered, stripped-off.
I don't know. Perhaps I shall call the police on myself. I don't know. I feel as
though I have been delirious all this time - the days have passed into weeks, but I
feel it has only been the smooth flowing of the clock and its slow, very slow,
tick-tocking, a saunter, a meander, a trudge. A trudge. Yes, I was trudging then.
The day after I was laid off. Yes, trudging back home because I felt so utterly
useless and rejected that I tried to lose myself in alcohol. I think that was when
I first got the habit, not now. I mean, not a few weeks ago.
But my forehead aches very harshly. I cannot think straight at all. The sequencing
seems foreign to me, like a movie that I had watched when I was a child and, trying
to recall it, something I had unconsciously jumbled and interwove into my own
story, into my own prejudices. I remember some things that I do not think really
happened. So what is the point in telling you? Ah, yes, yes, yes, there is a point:
I shall lose myself otherwise, for the boy is staring at me even now, when I am
typing this.
I was as scared then as I was now, I believe. Walking down the alley, the
intoxication had not relieved me of my fear. I feared people. That is where I got
my hatred from. I think so at least.