I have to tell you....you can't do my work without playing your personal life close to the vest... wait no, you can't do my work without waking up some mornings, looking in the mirror and not know who the fuck was looking back at you. If you didn't spend that requisite time over your morning coffee and pastry retelling yourselves all your current lies, shuffling them into some order that made sense, there was a chance you told the wrong lie at the wrong time.

There were days I couldn't remember my own name when I was doing good work. Something about Hathian had made me sloppy though. For a guy hiding out I was pretty fucking open about at least what my name was, maybe a little splash of backstory. Most people would tell you it was an innocuous mistake, but those people didn't have two dead hitmen and half a million dollars missing. It was tainted money, and I know that now. Cursed, the minute I touched it the stink of it smeared onto my skin and I couldn't wash it off. And yeah....its fucking cliche. Maybe the world is just out of new ideas. A worn down skidmark like Hathian was where the washed up flotsam and scum pooled, it was the very definition of cliche.

My arms hurt, a deep muscle burn not from being tuned up but from three straight days in a basement without eating and working out constantly, a solitairy photo on a dank mortar wall. The porous concrete breathing out the same sweat, piss, and heavy stink that my skin did. A five day beard that had stopped itching, clothes that had grafted themselves like a second skin, covered in th e same grime and dirt that I now laid in beneath the townhouse I owned.

I'd gotten used to the rhythm of my life. A teetering acrobat on a tightrope, the weight of the world on either side of a long balancing pole, one side holding the good around, the other the bad, both pulling and shifting their respective sides, teetering closer to both the precipice of madness and the destruction of my own identity. Another fucking cliche...I didn't have the time to be self reflective in a way that would make any of that make sense. I didn't have an original idea, I didn't have any ideas at all. I just had a photo on a wall in a fucking basement.

The balance was gone now. I'd worked so hard to climb out over the years. You see from 17 to about...23, my first run in the pen, I'd been what you might call, pathological. Sure I could manipulate and control, but I was out of control of who I was. Time alone in a cell fixes some of that, especially when you add a little determination. Back then, lets just say I didn't know how to control the darkness. it ran rampant. Could you blame me? Freedom had meant a lot. Until seventeen I'd been getting my....love...from my parents in their own special ways. Blood, shit, piss, and cum. There were always ways unique ways to show little Anjel what a good boy he was. I was a man though, eventually, all man muscle and hard, just the way they wanted me, trying to make me some sort of hardened asshole who could "live in a hard world" they'd tell me.....

That was until I embedded a garden tool in her fucking throat and watched her bleed out. I held her hand and told her she'd be proud, I was hard in a hard world, I'd done the hard thing. I think she was proud of me until the last gasp. I knew dad would be. If he'd ever known either. He'd never get the chance.

Cliche, I know.

Man like that has issues you know....but I'd done the right thing after getting pinched. I got right. As right as I could be, right enough. Now a photo in a wall in a basement.

Before I went in I had a few girlfriends you could say, if you called the whores that worked for you and called you Daddy, girlfriends. maybe it was more "friends with benefits", they all loved me, they adored me, how could they not, they had a piece of themselves that'd been missing and I knew just the right amount of whatever it was that needed to be poured in that fucking spot. Fill'er up just right. Before I went in, one of em told me they were pregnant. Cliche.

People might wonder why I never talked to my kid, but I was a bad man who'd done bad things, and I wasn't ever going to be the Father any kid deserved. See, I'd seen the light, and I knew I wanted to taste it, but it was always on the other side of plexiglass that tasted like shit. I could try and touch it, but it never truly was there, just something you could smell, lingering behind or in front of you. No matter how much I might have wanted to, I was hardwired, and if I hadn't been so much of a fucking coward I'd have ended myself for that kid.

And I should have....

You don't piss off rich people, especially rich people with dying kids. Rich people have resources. Rich people hire hitmen. Rich people hire private detectives. Rich people who blame you for their kid dying want revenge. Rich people send you pictures of your dead lover and your dead child, covered in shit and cum, ravaged by some sort of fucking animals, left in the fucking woods. Rich people knew how to really fuck over a person.

Rich people knew how to destroy a man, how to shut the lights off, to leave a man alone with darkness, to untether and unbridle the beast at the same time they crush a soul. A strange calm really, the death of one piece exposed a new piece of soul. Maybe cliche meant going back to the man he was, losing sight of the light. But this was something different, something strange was building out of the carved out chunk of shit that had been filled up with a private hell. There was something calming in the loss of a reason to live. The loss of all things that made good possible. People wanted to know why I tried, she was why I tried, she was gone. I didn't have to...try ...anymore. I could simply be.....whatever was left.

I did some more pushups and felt my tendons threaten to snap from strain and lack of nutrients. I stayed there for days longer, going thin, slipping away. Despair ruled, not rage.