Death.

Legend says it comes in threes. The dead could be strangers, friends, acquaintances. Or even more unfairly, the dead could be from the same family, leaving the once complete unit in tatters. Thus is the way of the world. Death sustains the natural order. Nature gives, and nature takes, snatching cherished, irreplaceable lives from one home and adding precious new heartbeats to others. Life moves on.

But murder? Murder is the acquaintance of death, taking and ripping apart lives, but doing so in a much different fashion than life’s natural occurrences. Murder is a choice, rather than left to nature’s inscrutable whims. A choice where the victim can be someone who deserves to die, someone who harms society more than contributes. When I’m taking lives, doling out death as though I’m its master, I often hope that providence replaces the life taken with one more righteous. It’s one of the few pure hopes I still innately possess, even if futile. I know my actions have a purpose, a reason I must keep going, even if the next souls end up just as sinister as the ones I take. 

As with all things, there’s a price—lingering unanswered questions and the falsehoods I’ve had to fabricate—to myself, my wife, and my children. But, hey, lying to our children is normal for parents, right? We lie to our children about the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, happy endings, and fairytales. We deceive our children by pretending to be satisfied with our lives, fabricating a false sense of happiness, even though we have regrets that haunt us to our core. Moments in our lives that we would redo in a heartbeat if given half a chance. We pass off poorly crafted stories about our day. We don’t despise our lives, doubt our decisions, or question the favor of higher powers. Our image is one of complacency and fraud. Every one of us is fake in one respect or another. 

It’s for a purpose, though, right? We have ways to rationalize everything. We lie to our children to shelter their innocence and protect them from the darkness and evil in the world. The little whites fill our children’s lives with magic and hope. But if we’re truly honest with ourselves, we often lie to them because we are the darkness and we selfishly want to shield our loved ones, desperately hoping they will still love us. And then, when we fail, we lie to ourselves that life is worth living, despite everything we’ve lost. 

I’m no better than anyone else. I’ve lied. Only my lies go deeper than the normal, mythical, innocent little white lies of a normal childhood. My lies extend further than just fabricated truths for the sake of reciprocated love. I’m a manufactured image of a widow and loving father who’s accepted fate and healed past wounds and traumas, an ordinary Charleston resident, seamlessly blending into the suburban landscape. 

My lies paint a picture of a person who doesn’t exist. 

I accept who I am and what I’ve done. 

I accept my destiny. 

I accept what I still must do as I stalk closer to the human garbage hanging in front of me by his wrists. I smile as I watch the blood drip from the tip of my knife to the bloodstone handle and replay everything that I’ve done to reach this point—all the parts of me I’ve sacrificed to become this person, all the lives I’ve taken to save others, all the answers I’ve provided from the truths extracted from the guilty. 

He thought he was a predator. 

I’m here to show him he’s prey.