I kiss the veil that shrouds thy face, oh Lord
And I feel the love and the joy without which the world could not stand
Vile and base as I am, I am still thy son
But I feel that love is slipping from this world
We are as insects trying to stand against the fury of the tempest
Cruel lust and hateful dominance press up against the walls of my very soul
The air is deafening with the sound of a million lost souls crying out to a Father
whom they believe has abandoned them.
I only ask of you, oh Lord
do your children cry out in vain?
The decision to kill Christian Ernett came fairly easily to Caleb. It was no big thing after all, to take the life of a bleeding sack of obscenity. Caleb just happened to be in the right frame of mind when he heard Christian beating the fuck out of his wife for the billionth time. The Ernetts were the family that lived next door to his shitty, little apartment. There was the husband Christian. There was the wife Linda. And then there was the little girl Samantha.
God she was precious…11 years old with those big brown eyes that saw everything. And that was the problem.
No way in hell that she would be able to block out all the shit that daddy did to mommy. In fact Caleb was pretty sure that daddy forced himself on mommy on a fairly regular basis, probably with Samantha watching. The abuse happened day in, day out.
God knows what else she witnessed living in that tiny wretched little hole with that animal. They could probably afford a lot better on his salary but that would never happen. Not the way he drank and gambled and fucked away their grocery money. Sometimes he would bring prostitutes home. He pissed away all their income on the lowest of vices and it was Samantha who had to pay in the end. Once Christian even stabbed Linda with a kitchen knife. Later in the ER they both claimed that she slipped and fell on it. Hard to believe that they could possibly serve up that crock of shit with a straight face. It didn’t matter though. No one cared. No one did anything. Everyone in the building knew. How could they not? But still, no one did anything. No one picked up the phone. The one time Caleb called the police she denied everything and defended him completely and utterly.
No, Christian would never do anything like that. To hear her talk you would think that her husband was beyond reproach. He was perfect. Christian was a shining example of everything the American male should strive to be. He broke her jaw that same night after the cops left, angry at how she hadn’t been convincing enough. Caleb didn’t call the police anymore after that.
Personally, Caleb thought that Christian was an inhuman pile of dog shit that personified everything that was wrong with the world. Christian beat his wife, cut her , raped her. He was sick. Repulsive. Christian treated women like cattle. Christian was everything the American male should hate and despise.
Eventually Caleb realized that the worse was yet to come. Samantha was a beautiful little girl and soon she would make a beautiful young woman…and it was only a matter of time before Christian would notice that.
Caleb thought that Christian was the purest form of evil that walked the earth. This only goes to show how naïve Caleb really was despite all the things he’d seen in his 26 years of life.
It was a simple thing really and done without any great fanfare. It was an obvious choice really, when you think about it. Make the world a better place. That was how his conscious mind made his decision. But truth be told the decision, the real decision to kill someone does not take place in the realm of the here and now with all the logical synapses in your brain working together to form a logical conclusion. The choice of becoming a murderer is not that easy. The real struggle, the War Within takes place somewhere primal, far beneath any conscious or subconscious mind you can read about in any book. The dilemma is fought out in our dark places. In the farthest reaches of our selves. It is as the saints are fond of saying "a choice of the soul" one that every human on earth no matter how good or how vile is capable of making. Such is the essence of free will.
And that struggle had ended inside Caleb one night when he was awakened by the sound of Christian beating his wife for the billionth time. He just lay there in the dark in his bed with his ear pressed to the paper thin walls that separated their bedrooms.
Sound of fists hitting flesh and breaking bones. Deafening.
But the screaming, the crying, the sobbing was the worse. She kept on pleading and crying out to a God who simply was not there.
He wanted to crawl inside himself then. To run away from this place. In his mind: just pack up, get my things and leave this shitty apartment building. These run down slums. This city with its gloomy skies, its shitty weather, its filthy streets and houses and endless supplies of rundown buildings where the desperate and wretched congregate.
He hated this city. Its streets were crowded and lonely.
In his minds eye he saw himself moving on to the next city and finding something. But he knew better. It would all be the same, just like before. In reality this place was no better and no worse than all the cities that came before it. All the big urban centers were turning into cesspools with the people just crawling around them like parasites. Then there were all those small towns in between. But Caleb didn’t belong there either. Maybe because he’d spent too much time wandering in the big cities. It had seeped into him. He could never wash the filth away. These quite, sleepy, little places could smell the stench of the cesspools on him, and they rejected him like some alien organism that might infect the rest of the colony.
It didn’t matter where he went. All the same.
Everywhere.
And then his mind was forced to come back into the here and now. Reality kept pushing back into his brain. It was like a strobe light at the back of his head and he could do nothing to stop it. The sobbing and crying poured into him till finally he realized that it wasn’t coming from the next room. His own tears and his own snot and his own hell poured down his face. He too cried out in the name of God, though he secretly knew it would do them no good. Not tonight. Tonight was for the devil. He felt something swelling up inside him like it would tear through his chest cavity and it felt like his very soul trembled in his throat. At that moment he sensed that he was coming to his breaking point. Either something in this world had to change or something in his mind would snap. Whichever way it played, something had to give. And he fought, oh Christ did he fight it. With every inch of him he fought to hold on. He clawed at anything that may save him, like an animal. He felt barely human in his desperation. Again, he tried to run away from reality.
He though of his brother. The good son who had gone on to join the seminary, only to be killed senselessly by some fucking junkie. He thought of the conversations they would have. The ones about God. About salvation. Redemption. Forgiveness.
He remembered his brother telling him in that calm slow voice of his how God created us in his image and how each one of us is precious and why we are all deserving of life.
Something stabbed at him when he thought about that.
He clenched his teeth. He shut his eyes. He covered his ears with his hands and tried to curl up into a little ball like doing all that would somehow shield him from what he knew he must become. In the next room things started to get bad.
The screaming got worse as Christian mounted Linda and Samantha begged him to get off her mommy. All it did was drive him on. It excited him. He reveled in the power he held over them. He started to pump away and it lasted no more than 2 min. but it held for an eternity. The moaning and the grunting of his cruel lust mingled with the sobs and the tears of his victims.
Christian, Linda, Samantha, Caleb. In that moment they were all joined together. For a few moments they were all connected. Christian even began to see into Christian himself. You see in Christian’s own mind, there was no difference between what him and Linda were doing now and the way they had made love as teenagers in the back of his beat up old Chevy out by the woods as the rain drizzled onto the lake. To Christian’s own sick perspective, he was doing nothing more than making love to his wife. Taking what is his. She was just another possession, like his T.V. or his sofa.
The steamy, dirty sick cries of " oh, god, oh, god" that Christian made as he approached his climax mingled with the cries of his wife and his child and his neighbor whom he barely knew existed. So that for a brief eternity it seemed to Caleb as if the whole world cried for a God who had forsaken them.
We are all deserving of life. We are all deserving of love. We are all deserving of god’s forgiveness. Mercy and love shall overcome all evil. No sin can never be forgiven.
NO
NO
NO
AND NO
The blade dug deeper into him, the more he began to understand. The more he began to realize the big lie and saw what lay ahead of him. Some part of him tried to hold on to what his saint of a brother had tried to teach him. But no…his brother was wrong.
SOME PEOPLE DO NOT DESERVE TO LIVE.
But still, the War Within raged and burned him until he felt like he would be consumed by it. He entered into that crucible of the soul where he must either allow himself to be transformed or be destroyed.
Just as an eternity neared its end, Christian finally finished and let out one last gasp of animal pleasure. At the same moment his neighbor passed through the crucible next door. It was Caleb Temple who went to sleep that night. It was Caleb temple who awoke to the rage of rape and violence next to the hovel he called a home. It was Caleb temple who closed his eyes to shut out the ugliness of world that had decayed into moral entropy and social collapse. It was Caleb temple who trembled in pain that reached down to the very thing he called his humanity. It was Caleb temple who beat his head against a wall of lies and false comforts till he finally broke through. Caleb temple shut his eyes…and it was Azrael who opened them. Azrael, The Angel of Death. God’s own executioner on earth who would meet out divine retribution.
It was almost as if Christian’s rape of Linda’s body had given birth to Azrael. And if it was that rape that spawned him, then it was Samantha’s cries and sobs that baptized him. In his mind’s eye he saw…everything. She was huddled in the corner with her knees up to her chin, her long dark beautiful hair falling over her face. That pale skin of hers almost shining with the moonlight coming through the window. Her pajamas had pictures of lions and tigers and bears on it. A tiny stuffed monkey that she’d found God knows where was clutched against her chest.
She was dying. Her life was draining away then and there. Any chance of happiness she might have once had was slipping away and getting farther off with each minute she stayed in that house. She would turn into a troubled and confused teenager who would turn to drugs and promiscuity as a way of filling that void in her. She would end up as an exotic dancer or prostitute or junkie or all three. She’d drift from one abusive relationship to the next, each boyfriend hurting her worse than the last. She’d die young, beautiful and unhappy, probably at the hands of a man just like her father. Another broken soul, a life destroyed by the weakness and selfishness of this creature. Another broken soul in a broken world.
The rage inside Caleb burned with a religious fervor.
Eventually the sobbing stopped and Christian dismounted his wife. He rolled over on his side and went to sleep almost immediately. Linda and Samantha followed for the simple reason that they had no choice. Oblivion was their only refuge from the hell of this man. Caleb prayed and prayed that something could still be done to save Samantha from the path that her father had set her on. Even with Christian out of the picture there was still a lot to be done for her.
So then and there Azrael made up his mind. Christain Ernett had to die. Simple as that.
Finally, Caleb drifted off to the best sleep that he’d had in years. He had finally made a good choice and done the right thing. No more wandering, no more being lost. He had finally become a killer for the God he had loved all his life.
And though our hands may be covered in blood
Let it be blood shed in the name of a holy mission
Amen.
By: Fabian Chacon
