The frustration of a botched job was a raging fire in my limbs. It pushed me forward, and I looted the house in record time. By the time I came out, the feeling had simmered down to embers. Glenda’s corpse was sure to have cooled down some too.

The trip home was so much worse. All of the intense emotion bled off of me like ink came off of wet paper. My emotional state was like wet paper too. Pliable and fragile. As my car navigated the twists and turns of Glenda’s neighborhood, paranoia set in. Several times, I could have sworn that I had seen the dog-man through my window. Hell, some of the time it might have even been real. God if I knew exactly how he managed to sneak around. One thing that was for certain was that he would be looking into Glenda’s death. Looking into me.

Sooner or later I’d arrived home. The house was empty. Lonely. so I climbed up the stairs to my room and laid down in my bed. There was nothing else to do at this point.

Murder was terrifying. Nothing had gone to plan.

In my mind, the only way to profit from a crime was to make sure no one thought a crime had even been committed in the first place. If you failed to do even that much you were fucked.

Physicists are fairly convinced that you can, at least in principle, reconstruct the past if you knew everything about everything. So it was an inescapable fact of physics that criminals left traces, and traces that are much easier to spot than the wave function of all the electrons in the universe.

Everything you have touched has your DNA on it. Everywhere you have been you have left hairs. Your parents, teachers, friends, coworkers, all know that you weren’t with them that day.

And let's not forget that psychology is physics too, at its core.Even having a motive is just waiting for someone to ask themselves who stood to benefit from the crime. Cui bono?

I had left all of this evidence all over the place. These were known unknowns. Fishooks in my skin waiting for the fishing line to go tense.

Then there were the unknown unknowns. I sure as fuck wasn’t a forensic scientist. These people spent lifetimes trying to extract all the information from a crime scene. Who knew what little tricks they might know? Sure, it wasn’t like on TV, but thinking that they were powerless was just naive.

And these were only the unknown unknowns constrained by physics — the known unknown unknowns. Then you had an entire world of magic bullcrap. The Illusions, The Fortune Telling, The Whatever it was that The Dog and Dr. Wilkins could do. The very two people who came to question me about this case. The very two people who were tracking Glenda and definitely knew she was dead. The very two people that had every reason to associate me with Glenda’s case. Suure, I was only one of a couple of victims, not a suspect — for now. But whenever they’d think of Glenda I would never be more than two thoughts away.

This was the irony of life. Jarqual had handed the golden peaches of immortality and I would choke on them, dying far before my time. Just before their sweet succor gave me a taste of agelessness. Greed comes before the fall.

There would be no one to help me. Whatever the Dog did kept people from taking me seriously. I was going to die, beheaded by that behemoth of a sword. Not the way that I’d planned to go out. Not that I’d planned to go out at all.

Depressed, I crawled up to my window, curtains still pulled shut. I felt safer that way. My eye met the crevice of light between my curtains and all of my vision became the driveway. No visible enemies. No encroaching doom. It was empty, but for a few listless leaves that let themselves be pushed around by the wind. Stupid leaves.

My eyes both rose and fell with the swishing and swooshing of the wind, tracking the leaves on their spiral journeys. One of them slammed into the broadside of a fencepost. It was stuck there, for a time, before being blown away towards the road by the merciless wind, while the others still lingered in the garden.

The leaf was like me, reaching forward for survival only to find an early end.

But I wasn’t a leaf though, at the mercy of the wind. I had legs. I could be different. I could be free.

It was that thought that drove me down this road. Life above all else. There was nothing more valuable. No amount of money. No amount of happiness. No amount of love or kindness or joy. In the end, what good were these things if you wouldn’t be around to experience them? Life was the only thing that mattered.

I had learned about death when I was a child. My father had just died. We attended the funeral — closed casket, but I screamed and I wailed and I cried until they were forced to show me. What was once my father lay there, unmoving and unresponsive. I talked at him,and he was… silent. That was the moment when I realized what death was. My father would never again read a book. He would never again say hello. He wouldn’t finish all of his—our—favorite shows. Never again wake up in the morning. Never again say hello. Never hear, see, touch, taste, smell or feel. Never experience. Eternally incomplete.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

That was when I’d walked out. One thing I was never doing again was attending a funeral. At the time they forgave my outburst because I was still a child. And I’ve been lucky to not have had anyone die since. To me, Funerals were nothing but a giant act of disrespect towards the deceased. They put the illusion of a pretty ending on an unfinished work, on something that never even should have ended in the first place. It might as well have been blasphemy, sacrilege, and heresy all at once as far as I was concerned.

But these weren’t feelings mortals were entitled to have.

Being just a human, there wasn’t shit I could do about it. Just like the infinite others that came before me, I had to file away my thoughts in the back of my mind. All just to keep drifting through life with nothing but the vague hope that some sort of secular miracle would fix this. At least I lived in the 21st century, a time where there was the tiniest possibility of it actually happening, unlike all the unlucky bastards that came before. But even then, most of what I felt deep down was despair.

Being a living corpse was my own personal hell. That was when Jarqual came, offering to pull me out on a silken thread. Offering me the only thing that really mattered. So of course I took it. Now all that was left to see was if it would snap from under my own weight.

I didn’t sleep the day of Glenda’s death. I was up the whole night, clinging to that thin thread. And as the hours after midnight ticked on, I became more… stable. The sheer despair that had filled me had eroded to a general feeling of danger and unease. In retrospect my reaction had been a bit too emotional, but it was not as if I felt safe.

Despite feeling as if the furry beast was always lurking just outside my window, behind my curtains, just waiting for me to let my guard down, nothing happened. There wasn’t so much as a noise all night, bar the usual sounds of household appliances.

The sun was barely up when I had to leave the house. The Clown would be meeting me at a local park to take everything I had managed to gather from Glenda. I had tossed it all in a backpack that followed me out the door.

My eyes were tired from the paranoia of the early hours of the morning, and the light made them ache more than it should have. Every blink left me feeling vulnerable and every step made me feel nauseous. The traffic lights were annoying, the cars too loud and the pedestrians too pushy.

Eventually, I got to the park, our designated meeting place. It didn’t take much effort to spot The Clown. He was a big, stocky man that straddled the limit between average height and “How’s the weather up there?” The thing that really gave him away though was the suit. It was a three piece suit with every part being a different color. Red, black and… yellow of all things.

“You’re late,” greeted The Clown. “I could have spent all this time with my wife.”

“You’re married?”

“To the ugliest beauty in the world.”

I was sure that his wife hated that description. Maybe the joke was witty, but the way he was grinning made it look mean spirited.

The Clown held out a hand, empty.

“Right, let’s hop to it. I have a hundred, literally, places to be after this.”

The guy was annoying and I was dead tired. So I wasn’t exactly the gentlest when I tossed the bag over.

Thunk.

The Clown’s arm didn’t even twitch under the weight. The guy was strong, annoyingly so. Still far below The Freak though. He seemed to grin, taking my provocation as a challenge.

“Heh. Not happy about offing some old lady? If I had my make-up I’d color myself surprised. You didn’t strike me as the remorseful type.”

At least the guy didn’t have a bad read on me.

“I shot her in the middle of the street.”

The Clown raised an eyebrow.

“So what? I mean, it’s a bit incompetent but you’re only a first time hit man. Idiotic as it is, everyone starts at amateur level.”

Was he… trying to make me feel better?

“Remember the giant dog man that I told you about?”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” said the Clown, somewhere between puzzled and angered. “Look, I told you, you got confused by a guy in a weird costume. Stop worrying about things that don’t matter at all. It’s stupid.”

That was enough of a reason to change tracks. I’d pushed the issue of the Dog the last time I’d talked to him. He’d just gotten angry by the end of it. “Jesus fucking Christ, you’re dumber than some of the people I know.” It seemed that he was still sore about it.

“No, I get you,” I agreed. “The dog is silly, but Glenda died in such an obvious way that I’m worried it’ll be traced back to me. Especially if someone with dream-based magic comes along.”

“Aaah,” replied the Clown, now more calm. “Look, I get what you’re going through. I went through it myself too. Some of my cousins were even assigned to investigate my first job, a job that I botched very thoroughly with an ax. There was even some of my blood on the scene. The point is that they didn’t find squat. Sure, they could find DNA, but why would they even think to compare it to mine? Do they even have the time to look into a crime with so few leads and no apparent motive when Johnny over there just murdered his neighbor in broad daylight?

He paused. I opened my mouth.

“It’s a rhetorical question, don’t answer,” grinned The Clown. ”Sure, I’d be a fool to say that magic couldn’t fuck up your day, but unless they’re lucky enough to have an ability tailored for investigation, they’re gonna be worse at it than the police. Risk is risk, but odds are you're fine. Save the worrying for the real shit. Trust me, you'll be a lot happier like that. I sure as hell am.”

That did make me feel better. It also made me feel that annoying kind of conflicted that you feel when a normally mean person is nice to you. You start feeling like, “hey, maybe they're not that bad,” and you set yourself up for disappointment. Unfortunately knowledge wasn’t normally enough to immunize me against my feelings.

“Thanks for cheering me up,” I said honestly.

“I don't give a shit. Later stupid,” he said. Then he vanished. Poof. No longer there.

Fuck it. I wasn't going to hold it against him. The bastard.