She was so alone in this world. So sad. So anxious. So still. So alone. She was only ever certain about one thing, only one thing in particular: death was best in all situations.

She was only seven, but she wanted to go to heaven. She was so unhappy, so sad, so alone that by the age of seven she dreamt of death; and Death dreamt of her often. It would often show up in her dreams with shaggy brown hair that covered its eyes, grey ash skin, black attire, and a threatening smile, though, to her it wasn't anything to be scared of. She welcomed Death with opened arms and would often play with it.

It would suggest foreign games to her like real life Hangman where on her last guess and she gave up, she would jump with a scarf around her neck, tied to the ceiling. Another one of her favorites was called Gravity. Death had first introduced this game to her when she was five. Explaining how if you dropped a golf ball from a tall building and then a bowling ball, the bowling ball would hit the ground first because it weighed more. Death had made this statistical fact into a game of its own. It was a race to see who could hit the ground first, but no matter how much of a head start Death had given the girl, it would always beat her.

Death had pulled at almost every last one of the girl's major arteries and had squeezed the girl's heart back to life more than It could count. It was true Death had killed her for the sake of the games, but It didn't want her to stay dead. She was simply too much fun to play with while she was alive. It loved to hear the snapping of her bones, the ripping of her flesh, the smell of her splattered blood; It would get no satisfaction if It had killed her all those times. Plus, she liked the rush. It made her feel alive.

Death was so selfish, so foolish, so blind that it granted the girl the gift of eternal life. It hadn't realized that all those years of trying to kill herself that this little seven year-old wanted to go to heaven; and stay with Death forever so they could play forever. It hadn't realized until it was too late that if the girl had eternal life, Death could not see or play with the girl anymore.

She was now back to being so alone in this world. So sad she couldn't play. So anxious to see Death again. So still she couldn't age. So alone she couldn't stand it.

She had always held Death tightly in her arms, happy as she played with It, but now It had cut off all ties with the girl so she could live happily in her years. That is until It desperately wanted her back.

((HIM))

Before dawn, the thirtieth of April, he bathed outdoors with bottled water and liquid soap. By the first light of day, he was safely ensconced in the deepest part of his hideaway. Laying on his mattress, staring up at the low hanging ceiling, he treated himself to the last of the remaining human organs he had in his possession.

Murder was always enormously satisfying. Tremendous internal pressures were released with the strike of a killing blow. More important, each murder was an act of rebellion against all things holy, against commandments and laws and rules and the irritatingly prissy system of manners employed by human beings to support the fiction that life was precious and endowed with meaning. Life was cheap and pointless. Nothing mattered but sensation and the swift gratification of all desires, which only the strong and free really understood. After every killing, he felt as liberated as the wind and mightier than any steel machine.

Until one special, glorious night when he was in his twelfth year, he had been one of the enslaved masses, dumbly plodding through life according to the rules of so-called civilization, though they made no sense to him. He pretended to love his mother, father, and a host of relatives, though he felt nothing more for them than he did for strangers encountered on the street. As a child, when he was old enough to begin thinking about such things, he wondered if something was wrong with him, a crucial element missing from his makeup. As he listened to himself playing the game of love, employment strategies of false ascension and shameless flattery, he was amazed at how convincing others found him, for he could hear the insincerity in his voice, could feel the fraudulence in every gesture, and was acutely aware of the deceit behind his every loving smile. Then one day he suddenly heard the deception in their voices and saw it in their faces, and he realized that none of them had experienced love, either, or any of the nobler sentiments towards which a civilized person was supposed to aspire - selflessness, courage, piety, humility, and all the rest if that dreary catechism.

They were all playing the game too. Later he came to the conclusion that most of them, even the adults, had never enjoyed his degree of insight, and remained unaware that other people were exactly like them. Each person thought he was unique, that something was missing in him, and that he must play the game well or be uncovered and ostracized as something other than human. God had tried to create a world of love, had failed, and had commanded His creations to pretend to the perfection which He had been unable to imbue them with. Perceiving that truth, he had taken his first step towards freedom.

Then one summer when he was twenty, he finally understood that in order to be really free, totally free, he had to act upon his understanding, begin to live differently from the herd of humanity, with his own pleasure as the only consideration. He had to be willing to exercise the power over others which he possessed by virtue of his insight into the true nature of the world. That night he learned that the ability to kill without any compunction was the purest form of power, and that the exercise of power was the greatest pleasure of all.

Finishing the last of the liver, he neatly rolled the empty bag into a tight tube, tied the tube in a knot to make the smallest possible object of it and dropped it into a plastic garbage bag that was just to the left of his head.

Neatness was one of the rules of the living.

The young man was not Death itself but one of Its many subjects. He had been killed and then resurfaced from reasons that he did not understand, but he didn't desire to go back to the deepest depths of Hell. He liked his newly found freedom.