For Motives of Mercy

Night has begun its claim; spreading dark fingers around the world of human lives.

Within a house deserted by love a figure moves slowly among the shuttered shadows. Someone moves from room to room, searching for an answer among the remnants of a painfully remembered past.

He tried to see it the way it was, attempted rationality. Mirrors show us what we want to see; but sometimes we look into the living, human mirrors and then briefly the fantasising has to stop.

Once again, he had reached their bedroom. He smiled bitterly as the memories of the love nest it had been swarmed around his mind, refusing to be forgotten, pushed away.

She lay there sleeping, in semi-darkness; half dead, half dying. Before the affair he had believed in love; now he only believed in death because to him it was the only thing that existed with the promise of being fulfilled by every life; surer than life and fictional gods.

And if he let her have the baby it would be to him a lifelong reminder of wife’s painful unfaithfulness.

He wanted to destroy that part of her which had turned away, and to hold on more desperately than before to the woman who had a place in her life for him.

She had called it a childish fling, a meaningless inconsistency which could be forgotten – but for the baby. Yet she must have felt something for him, somewhere deep inside the bottomless pit of her heart. She must have needed, must have wanted, must have loved him. If only for those few brief moments.

And he loathed her honesty. She could have said it was his child. She could have lied to show she cared. Yet she chose to hurt him with her truth. She stabbed him in the heart, then twisted the knife. Her honesty repelled him. He tried to love her, but the more he forced himself, the more intensely repugnance surged through him.

His hand drifted restlessly over her sleeping body and lay on her neck.

A warm glow filled him, a replacement of something lost. He tightened his murderous grip. The warm glow was followed by another.

And then another.