The Lesser of Our Sins by Spencer McCall

I have this compulsive desire to hospitalize someone; I want to beat my curled knuckles mercilessly into the bridge of someone’s face until the red splatter on my shirt warms my stagnant soul and cools the anger coursing in my arteries. Every heartbeat compounds more of that underlying hatred I eat with my eyes and send through my rigid body. My muscles need to spasm in angst, full of energy and desire.

But I am not the violent type. I maintain that it’s this lack of violence that has allowed a lifetime of rage to accumulate in the first place, but I digress: the past merely built the ledge I now stand upon. The leap of faith I muse to take is separate and uninfluenced by my prior self. Even so, how can I justify attacking just anyone and risk becoming what I have loathed for so long, and so completely.

I need my victim to deserve it.

I need a moral Cro-Magnon, an enemy made to be the manifestation of his society. All that disgusts me poured into this perfectly horrible being: a sexist, with a Napoleon complex and a tendency towards brutality. He abuses his lover. When desperate, he’ll pull his switchblade, and he’s always desperate. I smile at this creation. His failings give me an excuse to be a sociopath, yet remain the lesser of two evils. I could be almost a hero. But, despite the endless waiting, no such villain ever arrives.

So I break bones in my dreams. I romanticize every upper cut, the shock of impact reverberating up my arm, and into my shoulder. But the fantasies only take me so far; it keeps the need at bay, but as the dreams shake into reality, the hunger returns tenfold each time.

Still, no villain ever arrives.

So I continue with my nighttime drug. The dreams grow increasingly violent as the nights pass, forcing me to wake in a sweat. My girlfriend tells me I talk in my sleep, whispering due vendettas and pleading for pain. I listen to her concern and fear, and I begin to wonder.

Maybe I don’t need to be the aggressor. Maybe, if it wracks my body so completely, so relentlessly, pain could soothe the desire. Pain could shoot up my arm and into my shoulder, while my nose runs red onto my chest. If I could hate myself more than I hate the world, I could be the villain I’ve waited so long for.

My girlfriend went to bed.

And while she breaths so serenely, I open the window.

I take a leap of faith.

Into the pain. . .

Oh, the glorious pain.

© 2013 Spencer McCall

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