Chris Edison was a fat, societal reject who had never once in his life felt genuine compassion or kindness from another human being. His father had left to get cigarettes the day he was conceived and never returned and his mother, Elma Edison, had never quite forgiven Chris for it. This day was a day like any other for Chris as he sat in the basement of his mother’s suburban home, he had once thought of the aging home as being his as well, a notion his mother was swift to disabuse him of. Plates and cardboard boxes full of the crumbs of eaten food littered every available space around him, not that anyone who might care to observe would see very much of it with the only light allowed near his sallow waxy skin being that of the old crt on which he played his collection of games that were almost all stolen or obtained by which small measure of Chris’s allowance was not immediately spent on the acquisition of food and drink on which to gorge himself.
Not many thoughts found themselves inside Chris’s head at this time. Nothing more than the minute wordless decision making that fighting games required. This was the only time that Chris thought of himself as being happy. He wasn’t. He simply didn’t know what happiness was beyond the absence of sadness. And if life carried on the way it had since he was born some 18 years ago he would die in this exact position never learning what happiness was, his fingers tapping away on only thing his father had left behind, an old battered fight stick. It had at one time been painted with the logo of the first Street Fighter but under Chris’s consistent battering and poor upkeep of the device it was a wonder that the whole thing stayed together at all and no great surprise that the paint had flaked off a very very long time ago. Chris was sure he loved it, was sure that it was his favorite thing in the whole universe, and in this unlike his idea of happiness Chris was at least correct, but this didn’t make it any less sad.
But today Chris himself was not sad as he blubbered out what would have been for any other person a sigh of contentment and ran his fat fingers through the greasy mop of black hair on his head. He had won another match, something he did with far greater regularity than most people as his name sparkled in gold and moved from the fourth spot on his server to the third. A minor but not completely inconsiderable achievement. But this was not the reason Chris was not sad. It would be easy to trick himself into believing such, and he did, but the real reason hidden in the little heart trapped inside his chest was that his mother had not spoken a word to him today. Normally Elma Edison would already have come down to berate and belittle him and ask him difficult questions about jobs and schools and his future. But today he was free to rest his 400 pound frame in the aging arm chair beneath him in peace and let all the difficult thoughts die underneath thoughts of gaming.
He knew nothing would ever get better. He ran from the thought as hard as he could, tried burying it in food, drowning it in drink and ignoring it by pursuing the one passion that his mother had never taken away from him. It didn’t help in the end. There would always be those quiet moments when the thought would catch up to him. When he would be forced to look at the life he lived stretching on into eternity and he would have no hope greater than dying soon. After all, what person that hasn’t faced death thinks themselves afraid of it? It seemed so easy to him, he romanticized his own death as an escape, even as revenge. Surely, he thought, mom will miss me when I die, she’ll be sorry for the way she treated me. She wouldn’t. His mother had prayed every night to the good lord asking for the strength to kill him herself since he was born, but had never received divine help strong enough to prop up her black, shriveled coward’s heart.
Perhaps if Chris knew what was about to happen he would be grateful, perhaps he would be afraid. Perhaps he would view it with the same dull ambivalence with which he viewed death. Regardless of whatever his feelings on the matter would be, today the world would end and be reforged to suit the whims of a mad god. Eventually the world would be subsumed and become nothing more than a memory and the wretched waste that Chris had become would fade away into oblivion, less than even a memory.
A voice came booming from the sky preceded by a deafening crack as if from god’s revolver that shook Chris’ house all the way down to its foundations. It was a voice deep with righteous fury “All who were worthy among you have left for higher purpose already. Those of you who are left have been granted a mercy larger than what you deserve. Prove your devotion to your life by ending another.” Chris flailed out of his mess as the world shook again. His shock and confusion at a voice from the sky commanding him to kill was put on swift hold as his tv rumbled off of its stand and fell to the ground with a scrape and then the sharp crack of glass.
“SHIT,” Chris shouted. “How the FUCK am I going to buy another tv?” This was a problem with no solution to Chris, and a truly dire one. He, of course, did not have a job as most of them entailed at least a minor amount of work and that was unacceptable.
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The door the basement creaked as a lance of light pierced through the deeply rooted darkness of Chris’s nest of filth, revealing hundreds of discarded soda bottles and more bits of forgotten food. “Chris?” Came the voice of his mother from just around where the view of the stairs was cut off by where the railing faded into the bottom of the floor above.
“Mom, my Tv fell! How am I gonna find another one?” Chris said, his genuine frustration giving him the casual courage of idiocy.
“Don’t worry sweety, here why don’t you come up stairs and we’ll see if we can’t find you one online.” The crone crooned, a black silhouette against the light of the kitchen behind her. Chris stumbled his way through the piles of trash between him and the stairs in nothing but his boxers and a stained t-shirt depicting the face of some hateful yellow sponge, confused by his mother’s pleasant response but his small mind already entertaining fantasies of a mother’s love renewed. And more importantly a new tv that he would properly secure this time.
A stumbling turn at the bottom of the steps saved Chris’ pathetic life as half a load of buckshot from his mother’s Remington 870 ripped across the skin of his back. He reeled back screaming, unable to process the chu-chuk of his mother pumping the gun to try again or the clink-patter of the spent shell hitting the floor. It wasn’t until his mother made tenebrous steps down the stairs into view that he realised she was here to kill him. “What are you doing!?” He screamed in a shrill mouse-ish whine.
His mother stopped on the steps and chuckled darkly, half illuminated by the light. “I’m collecting on god’s mercy my boy.” She brought the gun to her shoulder and leveled the business end his way. “I always wondered why god made me suffer you boy. Now I know. You were my trial, my penance for a promiscuous youth. And now I have worn your storm and heard god’s call and lo he has made my trial into a mercy. You were born just to die for me, so that I could rise above what I had made of myself and sit beside Him at His table. Good bye my waste, my wretch. Farewell my demon.” Elma slowly squeezed the trigger as she breathed out in complete focus between her pruned lips. Chris turned and flailed as best he could as a crack of thunder bounded through the room and searing pain raked his left arm as the buckshot peeled his fat and flesh clear down to the bone. He screamed again, and just barely held back the urge to vomit. The cha-chuk of the gun brought a strange clarity to his mind. Chris Edison knew in this moment that he was going to die with such utter certainty that he almost closed his eyes and simply waited for the inevitable. But instead Chris did perhaps the only worthwhile thing he would ever do in his life, his one working hand grubbed in the filth on his life and when his fingers wrapped around the corner of something hard and cold he turned in the closest approximation he could manage of a smooth motion and hurled his fightstick across the dark basement just as a third crack of god’s fury lit the air.
Plastic shrapnel flew through the air as Chris roared in a blind fury and forced himself to his feet. “You try to kill me! After all you put me through, after all the shouting and beating and needling you think I was born just to die for you and call me your demon?!” Chris moved as quickly as he could, pushing a wake through the refuse of his life towards the mother that had forced it on him. Fear filled the one eye on Elma’s face that Chris could see as her aged hand fumbled with the pump of her gun. The spent shell was just beginning to fall to earth as Chris jumped scant millimeters off the ground and wrapped his grub like fingers around her ankle. He barely even had to pull and the crone followed him back into the filth below. An animal scream tore its way from his lungs to his lips as her weight hit him in his missing shoulder. Elma matched him with one of her own as her face fell close to his own. They wrestled blindly for control of the gun, Chris’ useless arm evening the odds until with one fateful twist brought them back into the partial light of the world above. When Chris saw her face, how she looked at him with nothing but the deepest revulsion from the very depths of her soul. Something inside Chris gave its last breath that day, some feeling that had kept his hope alive, of a mother who truly did love him, in spite of all that he had seen.
He jerked the gun towards himself, bringing his mother along with it. And he bit her, clamped his jaw shut as hard as he could on her cheek. Elma squealed like a dying pig and when her hand loosened on the stock he kicked her back with every bit of force he could muster. With a simple toss and catch he leveled the barrel down at his mother’s chest as she struggled to get back to her feet. “Wait-” she choked out, “wait please don’t-” Chris kicked her, causing her to scream and he watched, and felt himself enjoy her suffering. Enjoy what he saw as justice. “WAIT!”
Thunder cracked for the fourth and final time and Elma Edison lay still. And Chris was left alone, truly alone. Naught but the sound of his labored breaths and the pain slowly biting its way through the wall of his adrenaline to keep his attention from the body of the only person that had ever even pretended to love him. Deep wracking sobs took him to his knees, his head a mess of emotions he had absolutely no way to process and no means to control. He pulled the corpse of Elma close to his chest clutching for comfort from the body he had made still.