Sadism, Thy Name Is…
Gwendylyn woke up in the morning, but rather'd he had not. But he couldn't have everything in life, could he? For this reason, Gwendylyn preferred his dreams, and so only reluctantly left the scene of tripping an old woman down the stairs with a baseball bat for the grim reality that was his moldy, graying, and overall somewhat forlorn apartment. He woke up glowering at the ceiling, then, after several seconds, cursed loudly. He had lost again! Grumbling, he retrieved his toothbrush from the fish tank. All the fish were dead, but he liked to have their rotting carcasses in plain view. Besides, he liked to cut them upon one by one and make interesting patterns with their innards. He even wrote letters with them, sometimes.
Getting dressed in his usual grey, grey business suit (it wasn't originally that colour), he glowered once more at the ceiling, only to lose for a second time. The permanent ink frowney face he had so diligently drawn onto his not-so-floor refused ever to blink. Gwendylyn seriously considered stitching its eyes shut. It wouldn't be the first time. Not even the second. Or the eighth. And it certainly wouldn't be the last. Finishing his share of coffee, he was sure to save a few dregs at the bottom for Squidge, the 9-legged spider that had been living above his door for as long as Gwendylyn had been burning 5-week-old socks (which was at least several months).
Gwendylyn felt blessed to have such a wonderful spider for a neighbor. He had once thrown out a Teddy Bear he had savaged with a butter knife, only to find, the next morning, that upon walking out the door the Teddy Bear had smashed him in the nose. During the night, the spider had retrieved the stitched up ball of stuffing and sewn it into its web. Fervently, Gwendylyn had wished he could do the same to the dead, if only to have the pleasure of seeing his client's mangled remains festering for eternity, trapped in their silken funeral veils like puppies underneath the treads of an 18-wheeler. Oh, how the thought made him wriggle with delight!
He drove to work immersed in his usual bubbling storm of malice and bitter contempt, with hate like lightning bolts searing those around him. Gwendylyn didn't consider himself Gothic. Or Emo. No, he considered himself a caring, warm-hearted person who just happened to be in touch with the deepest, darkest truths of life. It wasn't his fault if he was cynical, was it? He sped through rainbow-streaked puddles and veered close enough to a man on a moped to cause him to shout in alarm and crash into a bed of jimson weed. Once, a police officer had caught him on his daily guiles, but he was dead now. In fact, Gwendylyn still kept a bit of the leftover blood in a champagne bottle hidden inside his chimney. The smoke flavoured it to a dark, rich consistency with a taste like charred bone.
He ascended to his office, condemned his secretary with a look that clearly said "Disturb and die!!!" And swam through a stack of paperwork that sought to drown him in litigations, most of which had to do with peculiar motor accidents and even more peculiar disappearances. Gwendylyn smiled and sat back in his prestigious office chair, before falling asleep and having an absolutely delightful dream about kicking small children and gathering their salty tears in a silver bottle to flavour his severely undercooked pot roast.