A Short Story About Deception
A short read
I think I killed a man once. He tried to rob me by deception, so I reacted with violence. The thing is, after, I thought about his actions, his motives, and his circumstances and I understood. I understood the game he played. The lying and the bluffing and the morality.
“Do you have change?”, he said.
I pulled out some coins from my pocket. He pulled from his mind a need to cheat me. He made me, by the power of thought and illusion, hand him the coins for his thin, bony digits to finger and pore over.
How I had said, “Let me see your note first, give me your note first in exchange for my coins.” “Don’t you trust me?”, he had replied with that deranged look of evil sinking in, his eyes deep and lost. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Here we go”, I thought and then replied, “I don’t trust anyone around here,”
Still, I thought I had my wits about me, I knew what his game was, but of course, by this stage, he had me, a pike on a hook. He became instantly angry when I touched him, why did I touch him? That was stupid. He hugged me when he had the money in his hand, his insipid fingers shut, the coins forged in the furnace of his lust and his rules and his need to deceive. He was laughing at me now, laughing at how good he was at playing the game with his own rules.
In one life I had behaved calmly myself. I had turned away and walked, leaving him content, and bragging to himself at how clever he was and at what a fool I was. But I had walked away, yeah dumb for sure, but calm in the moment. I took the chance to play by his rules and I had lost, some things you just have to accept. I shouldn’t waste my anger on money let alone him, let him suffer in hell and in this life I thought, his day would surely come, he wouldn’t remember me then, but I would be waiting when it did.
In another life I had grabbed him so unexpectedly and smashed his head against the wall, cracking his skin open so blood matted his hair, the smirk ran from his face and mixed marble-like with the blood. His eyes, were fixed and wide, wishing he had never learned to play the way that he wanted to play. Of course, I didn’t stop there, even when the crowd appeared expecting a school playground fight, horrified with what they got instead, at the spectacle of someone standing up for them. No, I didn’t stop there, I smashed his head against the hard brick concrete wall until, until…
Every night for a week I dreamt of killing him, every day I rationalised with my morals and with judged compassion. He lived in a world not unlike mine but closer to the edge, teetering on the rim whenever he woke, wherever he slept. He had an anger within him all of the time, probably hadn’t seen tranquillity for years, so who am I, who am I to judge what fuckin’ rules to play with, I’m no roulette wheel. In my head, I decided to let him go, let nature take him, take care of him as it saw fit, just as nature was taking care of me now.
The horizon shimmered, an oscillating mirage, how well I would do to see the mirages for the moral-less sirens they often are, enticing songs of lust, wealth and happiness, songs sung on the wind, as flippant as fame. The sky a perfect blue, cloudless pale to the edges, deep at its core. If it were a pool of water, you would have dived in by now, softness stroking your temples as you swam, treading water, enjoying the weightlessness of body and mind, the illusion of subtlety. As I walk, the vastness spreads it’s slick, the disappearing trail of flame crackles as grains of discarded popcorn cooking, floating on the breeze into my ears like migrating birds, always searching, searching for something to find. If you listen to the wind, it will always tell you something you did not know, if you watch the flow of water it will always show you something you could not see, a pile of undiscovered songs in the loft that I’ll sing for you later, round the fire when I have tamed it’s source.
The credits etc.
Words by CJ Whitman