Teetering by the Stream
Strolling at the far side of the meadow, where the ferns touched the gentle stream, Steven stood silently and dared not think. Thinking risked reflection, reflection risked judgment, and judgment is but a breath away from damnation. So, why think at all? Not after the work was done. Not after the target was dealt with.
Killers for hire like him were in such short supply, and so the demand was great. The burden of conscience infected most men like a parasite that wrapped around their brains from birth. Steven’s parasite, however, seemed to have remained dormant. It was there, either dead or sleeping, but there.
To his bosses, that dormant conscience was what made him so valuable. But even those contractors of the worst sort, the most brutal and vindictive, only asked for so much.
Steven was tasked to either make his murders look like accidents or to frame enemies of the contractor; those jobs were the most common, but they were always handed to him with hesitancy in varying degrees. The more experienced the contractor, the more casual they were when ordering a killing, yet the hesitancy was still there.
Something about ending a life paralyzed men no matter how accustomed they were to the work. For a reason not embodied into Steven, people saw murder as some transgression against… who knows? God, morality, decency, all of the above? Steven did not know why the deed of murder was surrounded with so many frowns — no, not just frowns, but the worst curses imaginable.
He had a few ideas. Nobody liked to see a loved one drained of life, nor did anyone look at a killing scene in the same vein as a renaissance painting since it was always coated in a film of disgust. Steven never thought it irrational to despise the act of murder, on the contrary, it seemed completely reasonable. But only seemed.
He did his work the same way someone hammers a nail into a plank of wood or loads boxes into a warehouse. To him, murder was nothing but an action like any other. The task had numerous consequences, of course, he wasn’t clueless about that aspect of the job which was why he was always so careful, but there was never any moment of hesitation.
He never looked at his hands to find them shaking. He never felt the world disappear as the realization of what he had just done entered his mind. He never had any moments like that. It was all just work.
Unknowingly to him, however, there were moments of hesitation. The hesitation was not before the killing but after, once he had obtained his reward and went back to his isolated house in the wilderness. The meadow next to his home had a stream at the end that never failed to call to him in the wake of a completed contract.
He made his way to the quiet water, always doing so with noiseless footsteps. At the edge of the stream, where he could watch the ferns touch the water just enough to get the tips of their leaves wet, he felt the inevitable hesitation.
Steven found himself teetering on the border of the universe, playing with the acceptable and unacceptable, right and wrong, good and evil. He never felt himself leaning one way or the other but always in suspense. It was as if he could think something, anything, and the balance would fracture, sending him tumbling down the dark depths of conscience.
As long as he remained where he was, teetering over morality, he could maintain his position as a force rather than an entity, a cause rather than a causer. If he kept his balance, never thinking, never reflecting, never judging, then he could remain as he was.
If he did think anything by that stream, it would start with a chuckle. He would laugh at the very fact that a man like him could even exist, and while that thought hanged in the air, he would hesitate to call himself a man.
