b r o k e n  n o w

                - ( a nny fic by megumi hunaki )

Some mornings, I just want to die.

I wake up and see the light streaming through the window, hear the birds chirping, and rub the dust from my eyes.

At this point, most people stretch and then greet the day cheerfully. I close my eyes and curse it. The infernal light, disturbing what little peace I can grasp. The twittering of the birds, expressing the carefree happiness they take so for granted, and I can never find. I hear children talking to their "mommy"s and "daddy"s, and can recall only too well my own suffering and dying.

People are assholes. Bastards. Idiotic fuckers with no perception of just how ignorant they really are, and of the choices they make.

They need to realize that there is no meaning to life, that they are not immortal, and that things don't just happen to "everyone else". I'm a teacher. No one sees how little effect on anything at all their life has, no consideration for anyone but themselves, how little they accept, how much they stereotype. No one sees. They choose not to.

And when they die, they seem to have the misconceived idea that they deserve bliss?

I do what I can with such inconsiderate bastards.

I kill them.

And show them how little they are, how fragile their life is.

At this point, I manage to sit up. I close the curtain and try to drown out the noise with my own thoughts.

And I go back to sleep. I'm not ready for morning.

Unfortunately, it always finds me, and I go through the motions. I change my clothing. I mess my hair up a bit. I look at myself in the mirror and smash it in. The glass cuts into my hand, and the pain feels good.

I slump to the floor and think.

I question my views of the world, wonder if I haven't just focused on the negatives and overlooked all the majesty ordinary people see. I wonder if I don't allow myself to see the world in all its true splendor.

Around this point, I'll take myself out to some bustling place – a restaurant, a shopping mall, somewhere – and look at things.

Today I have decided to go to the town's main street and observe the people. I position myself up against a streetlight and just watch. The sky is extremely blue, and the clouds float by. The first people I see are wearing denim, and they point at one of the clouds and laugh at its remote resemblance to a rabbit. I look up, but I don't see a rabbit in the cloud, nothing more than suspended water droplets. But I let it pass as sheer ignorance in their happy state, watch them walk out of sight eating ice cream, and return to my original position.

A mother comes along with her child seated in a stroller, playing with toys. I've always been of the opinion that children really know everything, and they just laugh at our believing we must teach them. This girl is wearing pink. I hate pink. She looks up from her teddy bear, which she's been drooling on, points at me, and laughs.

The lady stops and decides to engage me in conversation. After all, I must be such a nice man if her darling little Patricia has pointed me out, correct?

Inwardly I laugh at her misconception, but accept her offer to accompany them on their walk.

I don't really pay much attention to what they say, and only nod occasionally, when I feel that it's needed. Instead I watch the child, unworriedly playing with her toys, taking in the façade that is displayed by the world around her as such a nice safe place. I almost feel that I should leave; such an innocent soul should be around people like me.

I look up from the ground to see the mother prompting me to answer her question. I ask her to repeat it, and she points out that we've reached the ice cream shop, and would I like something?

I find myself remotely touched, and taken aback, at her offer, and take her up on it. I haven't really had ice cream in years. I've forgotten how it tastes, the creamy, soft feeling on my tongue. And I'm pleasantly surprised.

We go to the park and watch Patricia chase the butterflies. We go to the pond and I try to catch a bullfrog. We sit under a tree and eat dinner out of a picnic basket. The day passes in a blur of green and blue, and before I can remember my original purpose I find myself smiling. Genuinely smiling. It hurts – it's been so long.

Eventually the sun sets, and we walk back to the neighborhood where I live. I stop in front of my door, and look at the boarded-up windows, the whitewash on the walls, and the way it sits on the lawn like it wasn't meant to be there.

She asks if this is really where I live, and I nod.

She asks if I live alone, and I nod again.

And, finally, she asks for my name.

I manage to mumble out "Johnny", although I know that as soon as I tell her to come in for a drink I'll never be able to speak to her again. I do so anyway, and my mood falls from the temporary euphoria it had previously been at to some sort of nothing.

I'm going through the motions again, dodging her questions at how I can live like this, and about the single red wall. I tell her I'm trying to paint the whole house, and I just started. I'm lying.

I turn my back, say I need to go use the bathroom, and begin to sort out my thoughts.

The last time I was like this was with Devi… "immortalize the moment"…

I burst back out the door, before they can get to me… before…

And I scream. "LEAVE! LEAVE NOW, BEFORE I END UP KILLING YOU!"

She looks at me like she doesn't understand. She doesn't. People are ignorant.

"I don't want her--" I gesture to Patricia, sleeping in the stroller, oblivious to the world around her, "to end up like me. Leave… and don't, for the love of whatever deity you pray to, come back."

She does. And doesn't.

Is this what ordinary people experience every day?

I climb out the window and look at the stars. They are infinite, and remind me of how small I really am.

…I need to forget.

I walk out someplace. I don't know where, and it doesn't matter. I find someone. Again, it matters none who it is, all people are the same. Ignorant. Stupid little fuckers who think the world is so wonderful and so great and never bother with anything but themselves. They never see anything but what they want to.

If they saw… if they saw… they would end up like me.

They say people like me should die…but we're the only ones who realize how fickle everything is, and ho0w fragile life is, and how heaven is nothing truly, and how the world is just mocking us, and…

I collect my thoughts and somehow get him to my house. I can never remember how they come.

He follows me in for some reason or another, and I rig him up to today's torture device.

He pleads. He screams.

I smile for the second time today. And, in my mind, the memory is already fading.

I stop for a moment. I want to see if he has answers to my questions.

"If you don't answer me, I'm going to slit your scrawny throat."

"…all – all right…"

"Is the world a good place?"

"sometimes… if…"

"IF?"

"If people bother to care…"

"And why would anyone care about a useless bastard such as you?"

"I don't know why… they just do... and…"

"People don't care about anything but themselves. Why is it some people are happy why others suffer?"

"I don't know."

"Tell me or you're dead. God couldn't answer me – you can."

"Because the ones who suffer deserve it."

I kick his pitifully hunched-up body several times before calming myself down. I choose a knife from the wall.

"Did you know that you could be dead an instant from now?" I say, calmly, my back turned.

"…yes."

"Do you know that you should probably BE dead right now?"

"…yes."

"So then why do you continue living?"

"Because I need to make things better."

I pause for a moment. Another common human misconception. One person can change the world.

I turn suddenly and position my foot so that it is hovering millimeters above his neck. He twitches wildly, and his glasses fall off.

"…if you'd made better choices, then you wouldn't be here."

I can tell my eyes are cold, staring into his fearful, tear-ridden ones. I feel nothing.

He is silent.

I lower my foot.

There are gurgling noises, breaking sounds, and a strangled cry through his throat.

"WHY SHOULD I LET YOU LIVE? TELL ME! WHY DO YOU DESERVE TO LIVE?"

I remove my foot from his throat temporarily. He begins to say something.

His voice is small and cracked, and I can't quite hear his reply. I lean in closer.

"Repeat that."

He starts to, and I cut his throat.

I stab him. I kick him. I do whatever I can to him to let out my own anger, my anger at the ignorance I allowed myself to slip into for a single day. I allowed myself to become like the rest of them.

I can feel that anger, my hatred, surging out into the merciless mutilation, feel the adrenaline falling, and eventually the haze clears. There is peace. I don't feel. There truly is nothing.

When I am done, I go through the usual procedure of painting the wall. I dip the brushes in the fresh blood, and let the smooth stroking motions calm me. Then there is nothing left on the floor but the man's unrecognizable body, his wallet on the floor, and his glasses someplace across the room.

I pick up his body and dispose of it the way I do with the rest – I bury it in the lawn out front. Down deep. No coffin, nothing… since he wanted to improve the world so, he can make the plants grow… as tall as they will for what grass there is.

When I come back inside, dirty and with his blood soaking through my clothing and staining my skin, I pick his wallet up off the floor. The usual things are contained inside – a driver's license, some money, a few cards, and some pictures. I tend to look through the pictures, and then throw the wallet away. After, of course, removing the money. You have to live somehow.

There are pictures of him and a young lady I assume to be his wife. All smiling, happy. So fleeting. So…

Many pictures of his child; happy, playing, with food all over.

I stop for a moment, remembering the little girl in pink – running through the grass, trying in vain to catch a butterfly.

My hands tremble as I reach the final picture, and I realize… it's her.

Patricia. That was her name.

I take it out of the leaflet and hold it in my hands, careful to not get any blood on it. I can't stain her any more.

"I don't want her to end up like me. Leave…"

It echoes in my head. I can see the mother explaining to her that her daddy will never come home. I can see her crying, her tiny, still innocent face scrunched to try and hold back the tears. They won't stop coming. I can see her so clearly…

I close my eyes and clench my jaw. With a single, swift motion, I rip the picture in two. I pick up the pieces and continue to destroy them, until there is so little left it couldn't pass for confetti.

I had allowed myself to slip into the ignorance and the happiness normal people take so for granted.

For a day, I was a bird, flying freely through the skies.

And now my wings have fallen. I lay, broken, on the floor.

And then, as usual, there is nothing but the moonlight cutting across the floor.

It is always this way – after all the incessant screaming and clawing, the yelling; after the noise finished echoing in my ears silence seems to be sacred, ethereal… out of place.

I wash my hands of the spattered blood and sit myself on the nearest seat – which, since I happen to be in the bathroom, is the toilet. I pull from my pocket the glasses he'd had perched jauntily on his nose and begin to clean them off as well.

Life is so fragile. It really is.

And, yet… these glasses, sitting once on his nose, remain unbroken. I look at the minute writing on the nosepiece – '49-10. Shatterproof.' A long life is never guaranteed, unlike the longevity of these lenses, the infinite lasting of this eyepiece.

I slowly place them on my own face, and marvel at the distorted world around me. Things are blurry, crooked, and far form what I used to see them as. Softer. Slightly less menacing. I can barely make out the knives stuck in the sink.

The wall is beginning to dry. The lenses seem to distort color as well, for I can't make out them subtle changes of the shades as much as I can feel it. Things seem so odd. So unreal. So… so…

Perhaps it was these glasses that gave him such ignorance. Perhaps it's the fault of these lenses, and not so much the person himself, that caused his philosophy on life to be so futile. It still is. Perhaps they are the cause of his perceived immortality.

I take them off.

After all, I'm jaded enough as it is.

- NNY

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Well this is my first attempt at real, full-length (for a short story, anyhow, I guess) JTHM fiction. I hope it doesn't suck too badly. Any reviews, comments, etc are much appreciated… you can even flame me if you so wish.

This particular fic scares me. I found myself questioning my writing as I typed it (again), found myself trying not to… well, corny as it may sound, cry. I never cry at my own stuff, but the absolute hopelessness of Nny's perspective. I don't recall much about actually writing the fic so much as this typing of it… but I know that it was harder to get out of Nny's head than it was to get in it. I don't think my choice of typing music ('O Magnum Mysterium', by Tomas Luis de Victoria, and sung by the Westminster Choir) – basically a creepy 15th century Latin piece – helped much. It's a great song – one we're singing in my school's Chamber Singers – but it always makes me think. I dunno. The character of Nny in this fic is probably not too accurate, seeing as he's more a combination of my ideals on people and his radical way of dealing with those ideals.

Anyhow, as always, this whole piece of shit is © Megumi Hunaki 2002. So don't take it.

Nny, of course, isn't mine. He belongs to Jhonen Vasquez, who has about ten thousand times as much talent as me in everything.

Again, reviews are nice… ^^

- megumi, the poor tortured authoress