stained.

a killer is in my house. when he talks his eyes roll back into his head and his voice warms the air like a mid-winter gas furnace that breaks the silent of the night with a hum. his teeth are a broken cup and his face is red like the blood on the carpet after you pull the shards from the surface of your skin. every hour he releases a calculated amount of purified rage, before lighting a cigarette and looking at me with dead brown eyes. he sighs briefly, loads the gun, and points the barrel to my throat.

then he asks me to name all the reasons he should kill me.

i tell him that there aren't any, that i haven't done anything wrong and wish he would turn to vapour and evaporate from my atmosphere. he cracks his knuckles and bites his nicotine-stained nails, muttering to his mother who is in neither the room or the world. after minutes/hours/years, a violent jerk and he looks up at me with a calm gaze and tells me that maybe i haven't done anything right.

my palms are empty, my eyes are tearing and my lips taste of iron and salt. their is fear in my voice and i can't steady it, it's coating the inside of my lungs and making it hard to breathe. i tell him that can't be because i am young, because my skin is unmarked and my eyes are lighthouses that guide the lost and lonely home. he slams his fists down and tells me to stop being human, stop pretending that i have a future that matters.

i cringe and crawl back inside my head where i scurry through my mistakes in a maddening flurry. but i can't find the reasons so i cry so i ask what he wants with me, why he is here in a middle-class suburban house filled with weathered chairs, half-filled jars of unknown spices and paintings of places i have/will never be to. with a gasp and a grasp he lifts the brand-new hand-carved coffee table and throws it into a wall pinned with predictable poems that satisfy shallow emotional needs.

he roars and tells me that he just told me, and that he is doing what is right. with the tantrum of a sleep-deprived child he tells me that i am not worthy of life, because i worry about money and weather and what the homeless man on the street really does with the money he is given. hes says i watch the evening news and feel sad for the starving children and angry at the greedy politicians, telling all and no one that those children should be fed and if i was a politician i wouldn't be greedy. and i look at the beautiful places in the world and tell myself i will go there, when i am ready and have more money, because there is always time until there's not.

a whimper but i am confused, i tell him that without these things society couldn't function, that we need money, suspicion, sympathy, anger, dreams and most importantly denial. what would we do if none of us worked or cared or dreamed, if we put an end to materialism and started a life of something else that we can't even imagine because this is all we've ever known. i tell him that this is all we can be, that if we were any different then the world would fall apart, so he curses and tells me that not good enough, because he needs something more from this world, because if all we are is nothing but weather forecasts and interest rates then he wants no part in it, so he points the gun in my direction.

and by the flicker of a broken lamp in the darkness of my home, the overturned coffee table and smashed jars across the floor--i can no longer see him, because the gun is in my hand and there is a killer in my head that hates the world for what it is and wants something from it that it can't give.

i smoke a cigarette, sigh briefly at the gun at my head, pull the trigger and the lamp goes out.