Wednesday

 

John wiped the tears away from his eyes and looked over at his clock. 6:12am. He had been awake all night, and this was the first time he’d even considered what time it was. He’d meant to do what he was planning to do much earlier in the night, but admittedly, he was afraid. The thought of it was so…permanent. But the finality of it all also had its allure. He was tired of living.

 

He had wrestled with the idea of pulling the trigger since about 9pm the night before, after making the decision to take his own life days earlier. He perused over his suicide note one final time. He didn’t know why, but he wanted anyone who read it to know what time he made his final move. He looked over at the clock one last time, which read 6:16am, and jotted it down as the final strokes of the pen on his last correspondence with the world.

 

He set the pen down and picked up the revolver from his bedside table. This time, however, he did something different. He didn’t hesitate. He put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger without a second thought. Suddenly, everything went black. Then, as quickly as it had gone dark, everything came back. John sat up and looked around, surprised and baffled to see his lifeless body lying next to him on the bed. He was certainly taken aback at this, but not necessarily scared.

 

He looked up at what used to be his head, and found nothing but a mangled, bloody mess. John didn’t know what to think at this point. He did notice that he had an anger inside him. What used to be a sadness that filled his body on a daily basis was now replaced by a red hot rage. John had been an even-tempered man his entire life, he’d always let his anger go, converting it to sorrow, which inevitably led to his apparent demise.

 

He looked at his hands (not the hands of his dead body), and found nothing. He took his non-existent hands and brought them up to his presumably non-existent face, and felt what should have been there. It wasn’t the bloody mess that the body in front of him presented, but a normal, complete scalp. He got up and walked into his bathroom to look in the mirror, and found that he had no reflection. At this point, he got a bit creeped out. As if responding to the emotion, he suddenly saw his reflection flicker in the mirror.

 

For the next several hours, John spent his time in front of the mirror, honing the ability to show himself at will. When visible, he was wearing the clothes he’d last worn before taking his own life, which was a white t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, with a pair of socks and flip flops on his feet. It took him a while, but he was eventually able to mostly maintain control over when he was seen and when he wasn’t.

 

The feeling he had in him earlier, that anger-converted-from-sadness, was beginning to boil over the top at this point. He had focused enough on figuring his new self out, but now he had to acknowledge these feelings. And he knew just the way he was going to do that. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, and not taking it out on the people that made him feel the shame, sorrow, and regret that had led him to commit suicide, and direct all those negative emotions back on the people that caused them.

 

His first stop was to the woman who’d started the domino effect that ruined his life, his soon-to-be ex-wife, Katherine. They had been married for nearly 5 years, so he know her schedule, and today was a day she had off work. Finding that he was now able to move much quicker, as he didn’t have a physical body’s weight to carry around, he went from his one bedroom apartment to the house he used to share with his wife, and found her sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette.

 

He stood, unseen, across the street. When she got up to go inside, in the blink of an eye he was inside too. He invisibly watched as Katherine went inside, sat down on her couch and started doing something on her laptop. John took this opportunity to scare her a bit. He went into the kitchen and quietly opened all of the cupboards and drawers, turned on the sink faucet to get her attention, then stood back and watched as she freaked out.

 

When she walked into the kitchen, Katherine was horrified; John could see it in her eyes. While she was closing everything, John went into the living room, turned on the television. Katherine quickly ran back to see if someone was in the house. John soon grew tired of the game he’d started and decided to do what he went there to do. This began with hurling Katherine’s laptop at her head.

 

The laptop broke in two when it struck her in the head, and knocked her to the ground with a shriek. John then lost it. He began hurling her around the room with great ease; he was much stronger than he had been when he was alive. He brutally beat his former lover to a bloody pulp, then used fire pokers to pin her up to the ceiling of her living room, leaving blood dripping down onto the carpet.

 

From there, he went to visit the new man in her life, a loan manager named Kyle. Kyle worked on the 12th floor of a large building in the downtown area of their city. John was able to make the normally 20ish minute drive from Katherine’s house to Kyle’s office building on foot in about 40 seconds. He made his way up to the 12th floor and upon entering Kyle’s office, numerous papers flew off of the man’s desk. Kyle looked around, wondering where the draft had come from.

 

John stood there, feeling his hatred for this man reach its breaking point. He looked at the smug face that had come between him and the woman he (once) loved and felt nothing but disdain. He knew this man didn’t care that he had ruined a fellow man’s life, and hated the fact that he seemed so pleased with himself. The rage within John finally overcame him, and he showed himself to Kyle.

 

Kyle let out a “what the fuck” when John flickered and appeared before him. Then John disappeared again. In that same moment, invisible John was less than an inch away from Kyle, where he then proceeded to wrap his hand around his throat. He watched in ecstasy as Kyle gasped for air and the veins in his face protruded as if they were trying to free themselves from under his skin. John’s newfound strength allowed him to feel the bones in Kyle’s neck weaken and begin fracturing.

 

Deciding that asphyxiation was too good a death for the man who’d cuckolded him, John lifted Kyle a few inches off the ground and put him against the glass that separated him from a 12 story fall. It was a sturdy glass that made up the window, but even so, John used his strength to its full potential as he pushed Kyle into it by his throat. The glass started splintering, eventually causing a large spiderweb crack from the pressure John was putting on it with Kyle’s flailing body.

 

Then the glass shattered. Wind rushed into Kyle’s office, sending all the remaining papers he had on his desk flying around the room. John moved forward a few inches, to the point where the only thing separating Kyle from a 12 story drop was John’s firm grip around his crushing trachea. John relished the feeling of watching the life drain out of Kyle’s eyes, and just when he was about to pass out, John let up on his grasp.

 

Kyle took a few weak, gasping breaths, but came back to his senses. It was just then that John let go, sending a fully conscious Kyle plummeting to the concrete below, a stiff *crack* being the last sound he ever made. John listened to the screams below from people who were outside at the time, then simply vanished.

 

The third item on his list was his former boss, who’d fired him unjustly shortly after his wife revealed she was having an affair. The man was named Bill, and he ran a landscaping company. John used his quick travel to go to the main office of the company and look at Bill’s schedule, then went to the corresponding jobsite.

 

There was Bill, leaning against his truck while 3 other men did all the work. Seeing these other men, his former coworkers, only fueled the rage within him. They all behaved like high school students, with their little “clique”; they were all favorited by Bill. As Bill took a single drag from his cigarette, John made his way over to the three men and snapped all of their necks in such rapid succession that by the time Bill inhaled the smoke, their bodies hadn’t yet dropped to the ground.

 

Bil blew out the smoke and pushed himself off the truck, bewildered at what had just happened. His 3 favorite employees had all just suddenly dropped on the dirt that surrounded a running woodchipper. John followed closely behind Bill as he went over to check on his employees. He turned off the woodchipper, which John immediately turned back on. Confused, Bill turned it off again, which was instantly undone by the invisible John. The third time, Bill pounded his hand against the off switch, at which time John smashed Bill’s head against the side of the woodchipper, surely causing a fracture in the man’s skull.

 

John the turned the woodchipper back on and lifted Bill up by his shoulders. He then swung Bills legs into the tray of the woodchipper and then, he materialized for a brief moment. Bill saw John’s face one last time before he started feeding him into the woodchipper feet first. Bill let out agonizing shrieks of pain as the blades made a stew of his bones and skin that spit out the opposite end of the machine. Using his strength, John didn’t allow the machine to quickly rip Bill through, but instead slowly fed him into it. Bill finally stopped screaming around the point where the blades hit his stomach, and Kyle let go, listening to the crunch and squish of all of his ribs, his chestplate, his internal organs and his skull get pureed in the woodchipper.

 

And with that, John went back to his house. He sat down on his couch for a few moments, pleased with what he had just done. The problem was, the rage was still in him. The hatred for everything that had ever done him wrong still loomed over him like a raincloud, and the desire to cause  pain to others was nearly overwhelming.

 

John thought he had just finished something, but in reality,  he had only just begun…

 

Friday