A/N: Random experimental sort of piece. Extremely rough draft, critique welcome. All formatting is intentional. Violence, language, you've been warned.

After all the camera crews have gone and the media caravan moves on, you remember what he first told you. Pretty words, like I’m okay and We were young and I don’t mind it anymore. You watch strangers fish what’s left of him from the river and those last words cut you. And you remember what you said to him, things like That was long overdue and I’m happy for you and Go talk to him sometime. Those cut even deeper. You don’t tell this to your wife, hanging hapless on your arm; you don’t whisper it over your best friend’s body when you go to close the casket; and you sure as hell don’t say a thing to the facsimile of flesh they’ve managed to string together in the morgue. No. You keep this secret till you die.

He’d gotten the idea three weeks and two days ago, prepared himself for the deed with vigor and purpose he hadn’t even known he possessed. Went to the bank and withdrew everything, walked out with wads of cash balled in his fists. Went home and wore clothes he hadn’t touched in years. Went out to cafes and diners and parks, bought things he didn’t need and watched people he didn’t care about, because his fate was sealed and he was as dead a man as his cousin was going to be and he was feeling too good to give a shit.

Funny thing. Nearly two weeks to the day that his entire life was going to end, and suddenly things were coming together in ways they never had before. He’d met a girl, a skinny little thing with dark hair and eyes as pale as hailstones who he couldn’t stop telling you about. Her name was Brooke. Some days she was a model, some days a lawyer, most days just a bony fucking whore with a horse face and a crack pipe who told him that he loved her and she loved him and wasn’t lying when she said either. And they made sweet love and never truly broke up, just didn’t have the time to keep going.

You didn’t see him much after that, but really, you’re not a factor anymore. It’s all about them, now.

Days passed. The date was growing closer. He should have been worried, but his heart was light, light, so fucking uncontrollably light and nothing could touch him, nothing cut him like it used to. He roamed the streets with his life savings in his pockets, slipping money to bums crowded on corners and under bridges. He even took the time to sit with them and listen to their stories, something he never would have considered if his own were not about to end; he shared his plans with every one of them who’d listen and they’d shake their heads and laugh, disbelieving, but what did he care? He was a desperate man and they were desperate men and women, and the only ones who’d bear his secrets. The sane ones ignored him, didn’t take him seriously—that was all right, it didn’t sting quite as sharply anymore. And the others, well, they understood.

It was at last his last day and night as a free man and he spent the time alone. Thinking. Running his hands through his hair, staring at cracks in the ceiling for the last interminable time. His mind was running like it always did but hot with revenge, and at speeds it never had before, and for once it didn’t bother him in the least.

Early in the morning while you were sleeping he was walking by your house, fingers itching and clenching, whispering to himself. Saying things like I’ve prepared for this and No turning back and Goddamn. It might have felt ridiculous at one point, he was thinking as he walked up to Duane’s run-down house, but he’d passed that point a long fucking time ago and by the time that thought came around he’d busted down the front door and there was no time to think anymore.

Duane yelled again—too loud this time—and was silenced with a kick, trussed up like a girl in a horror movie while he considered his options. He had brought knives, wires, even a pair of garden shears. But it was his hands he itched to use.

So he did.

He dreamt good dreams that night, perhaps the best of his short, hopeless life. He dreamt of old lovers. Of that girl he’d met once in that city he couldn’t remember the name of, who blew him in the backseat of his shitty car and actually swallowed afterwards and later laid her head on his leg and told him sweet things and pretended he hadn’t paid her to do any of it. He dreamt of a fantasy girl three heads taller than he was, with dark skin like satin that you could see her bones beneath, and the body of a goddamn Olympic runner. He dreamt of his mother and her sweet, strong hands lifting him up to the sky like an offering to some wild pagan god, dreamt of his cousin Duane on his knees with his head in the dirt and his stump of a neck gushing red, with his last fucking breath begging for mercy.

The next morning, he woke to the sounds of glass shattering and sirens wailing and, clumsy with sleep, picked himself off the bloody floor. Jumped his cousin’s fence, leaving smears of Duane’s blood all over it—subtle mockery—and he ran through the trees and down to the river with the sounds of the chase behind him. Flung himself into the water, plunged through the filth, let the breath ebb from his body. There were black flecks floating like little animals in his field of vision, and an awful pressure in his head and he wasn’t getting any air and he could’ve sworn that the dizziness and panic he felt at that moment were better highs than any he’d ever gotten, better even than lines done off of Brooke’s taut stomach or Duane’s hands wrapped around his neck.

The day after that they stopped outside your door, the police and media both—grief is not enough to keep anyone away now, and before you knew it you were on the news. TVs all through the nation showed your sheepish face while you rubbed the back of your neck and talked to your feet about how you never expected this to happen, told the ground what a great person you thought Duane’s cousin was and what a great relationship you thought they had. But thoughts don’t matter; change the channel, and Nancy Grace and Larry King are talking, somber, about what a sick puppy he turned out to be. On news networks everywhere the entire sordid story unfolds.

Their fathers were brothers, sick fucks both, close to their children and each other in twisted ways that family never ought to be. And their sons hated one another from the moment they met. You stop here and the newspeople press you for more but here’s where it gets personal and and you say nothing, except to your wife when she asks you gently what they were like though what she really wants to know is what did you have to do with this. And you’d talk about Duane, your best damn friend in the world, beating the shit out of his cousin not two days after Duane’s dad, in turn, had started fucking him. Well, something in your pretty wife must have died then because it didn’t take long for the two of you to part; she broke her vows hauling her bags into the back of your truck while you sat on the couch and the pains in your head and heart told you you were still alive.

There were kisses between brothers and beatings between cousins, dismissed as sad realities and so-called victimless crimes where everyone involved just happened to die. Everything about that family was warped and you, by dint of association, were just as fucked, by all the phone calls, the internet speculation, the questions. Who drove him to it? Where did it start? Why? Average every-day idiots with nothing better to do than postulate like junior fucking psychologists.

You’re looking down the road now, and it doesn’t get any easier. Documentaries, biopics—Inside the Mind of a Killer—all of them with your name somewhere in them, and it’s too much for you to take. Time to end this shit, you mutter around the metal in your mouth, right fucking now.