Grayspace

_Null

My name is _Null. It's my job to convince people to kill themselves. Nobody remembers my name.

I'm that good at what I do.

____

The houses are close enough to kiss. The sun is blotted out. I pull on my cigarette and the tip winks into life, like an ember from hell suspended in a gray world. The endless traffic is inches from my toes. Bumper to bumper and unrelenting.

Two houses down, I can hear my mark. Thirteen year old male, may as well be a six year old girl, the way his mother rides him. She says jump, he says "How high?"

Or else.

Things are at that 'or else' stage. He's actually growing a pair. Sad part is he doesn't know what kind of teeth a woman has after decades of stepping over people. It's his first time he stepped up to someone that he was raised to see as infallible.

He's her son, but he's still a man, and breaking men is a science she's studied religiously.

He's doing a good job of being coherent. He's sticking to the argument at hand. She keeps trying to distract him with whatever extraneous crap she can cough up. But no. He's sticking to the facts. She's full of garbage, her verbal arsenal is garbage. He's come far enough to see through her tactics.

His mistake is that he thinks she actually cares about right and wrong. She only cares about power.

Three rustbuckets zoom by me. One driven by a mother of two that was a goth in tall boots before she got pregnant. The other two are bumping loud rap music. They don't know that a demonic woman is being thrown off guard in one of the hundred houses they're passing. She's being forced to revert to taking out this long list of everything her son has ever done wrong, complete with dates and times and people present. It's the only way she can shift her focus from her own sins: Magnifying the sins of others. Especially the people she wants to keep under her thumb.

His honesty, his championship for truth is trodden under her falsehood and deceit. He goes to his bedroom crying. She bangs on the door as if it's locked (it isn't) belching threats and vitriol meant for her father, but he's dead, so her son has to bear the burden.

He wants to die.

I stamp out my cigarette and move in.

We talk. I kiss his cheek. I tug on his earlobe with my lips. I run kisses on his jawline, his neck, his chest, like a burning fuse that snakes down to the powder keg in his heart.

When his mother finally goes berserk and kicks in his bedroom door, he's dead. He slashed his wrists with the knife he took on his first camping trip. I kept him quiet with a little lip mashing to take his mind off the crimson streaks jetting into his lap.

"It's ok," I kept telling him. Until he believed me. Until he couldn't believe anything else.

I didn't get paid. I was just allowed to live. I was allowed to find someone else that needed a little nudge.

I was allowed to experience purpose, another project longer. Another target longer.