Inevitable

“Day in and day out, the same news on permanent repeat.’

“This is all so ridiculous.”

“This world is…’

“…rotten.”

Death Note episode 1. The monologues of Light Yagami and Ryuk overlap to generate an apparent dialogue.

Zoom out to real life. One past midnight. The neighbourhood suddenly woke up to a gruesome scene below. Red and blue flashing lights. Figures in uniforms and suits scampering about like insects. A body splayed out on the sidewalk.
Spread-eagled, as the grammatically correct term would be. His outline had been traced out with chalk. Slowly being eroded out by the red bodily fluid ebbing out from below. Police markers marking the extent of his “impact crater”.
He was dead. Clinically speaking. No return to this dimension. The existential full stop. No afterlife. No redemption. Nothing. The lifeless eyes gazing ahead, shining in the lights, but no hint of life behind them.
The detective was immersed in thought, his face alternately glowing blue and red. Was it a suicide? Or murder? Nothing could be ruled out. Correction. Nothing should be ruled out. Investigation basics. He was just doing his job.
Faces peered out through the windows. Some mustered enough courage to venture out of their warm homes to waddle like penguins towards the police perimeter. The proximity soon filled up with foggy breaths of the onlookers, wanting in on the action, not knowing that they were all guilty for this young man’s predicament.
Up above in the small dimly lit apartment, the walls told a different tale. First impressions would put the tenant in the position of a psychotic serial killer. Yet the truth was far from that.
The blood stains were his own. Each one a testimony to the scars he bore. The witnesses to a world so cruel, so ruthless, that a human had to “kill” himself every once in a while. To stay sane. To “fit in”. All he wanted was to be himself. Yet the hypocrites around him decided different. To him they were all the same. Monsters.
And they finally managed to seal his fate. On this cold winter night. The blood sacrifice wasn’t enough to extinguish his bitterness. He needed to make the final sacrifice to appease the Monsters.
Far away in the distance, the Goddess of Death shook her head in dismay. “Yet another young soul snuffed out. This world really is rotten,” she murmured, her slender figurine dissolving the darkness.

© Auro_20032016