The Empty Man

Your existence is that of the wretch. Your freedoms are few and far between, and it is all because of that freak. That man, no, not a man at all, but a diseased walking abortion of logic and sanity in a man’s shell. He takes care of you, he feeds you, he provides you with a dry place to sleep, and he lets you outside. That last “freedom” is not freedom at all, because you know he only does it to give you false hope. The hope that someone notices your fractured teeth and mangled leg and decides to take it upon themselves to investigate.

But you know that won’t happen. It will never happen. No one cares enough to dig deeper, especially since he tells them that you were this way when he adopted you. He is an unpleasant, disturbing entity by design, and his intentional sociopathy perfectly dissuades any conversation that would begin to reveal certain discrepancies in regards to your abuse.

Today is just like any other day in October this year. It is cold but sunny. The hateful, taunting lack of warmth that this sunshine would normally entail makes you want to cry as he jabs the screen door open with his good foot. You know hope is all but gone, and you will likely die someday very soon given how you have already lived a freakishly prolonged existence due to some horrifically ironic quirk in your biology, but the outdoors is at least better than staying inside his house. Its shocking lack of any attempt at upkeep, its trash bags stuffed full of the end results of his appalling hobbies, and its blood and vomit stains on the carpet that hasn’t ever been cleaned since he moved in.

The key word here is “relative”. In a “relative” sense the outside is better.

All the same, the phrase “evil within, without” comes to your mind as you follow him down to the lake. The teenager with the dyed red hair, his most recent victim, is probably still there, where he left her to die just like all the other innocents he preys upon. The same modus operandi; buried up to the neck in mud, mouth taped shut. By now the area by the forgotten lakebed is riddled with a good dozen or so rotting heads poking out of the silt, the garden sown and tended to by a most disturbed man. He must have been born an empty husk, his angel not having given him a soul, you think. It is as good as any reason to explain the actions of a serial killer.

What you have seen you will never be able to relay. You don’t have a soul, either. But this is because you are a more literal animal, a mere housecat, not a monster in human guise. Still, you like to think that, as a base creature of God’s green Earth, you understand more of what it means to be human than your owner ever will. Empty of reason, empty of empathy, empty of everything that makes him human save for his wasted genetic code.