Author's Note: Ficlet for ff_friday. April 24's subject: right and wrong. Length: exactly 1,000 words. It appears my curse for writing long fiction has struck again!
Ignorant
By Trisana McGraw
From the start, something was always not-quite-right about Jubal Early. He grew up hearing whispers about how Dad had left Mom because of him, the worthless runt. He didn't believe anything he heard, though; Mother was his world, the only thing that mattered, and he was hers. They got along together and they got by.
Jubal was a happy child, but even his mother would admit that sometimes he was hard to handle. He had an ugly temper that reared its head often. Somehow or another he found a way to get into trouble, and as he grew older, it became more frequent.
He was not ashamed of his actions, nor would he try to change, because he didn't know the difference between right and wrong. Even as he went into his pre-teenage years, he was blind to the stress he caused his already overburdened mother.
She made a big mistake by leaving him home alone one night while she was working. He had wanted to keep himself warm, so he made a fire with the forbidden matches. Before he knew it, bright flames had leaped from floor to walls to ceiling, and he was surrounded in a blazing inferno. Scared and disoriented, he barely made it out of the house as the authorities pulled up, his mother following. He bared his teeth at the policemen trying to question him, but he immediately subdued upon seeing his mother's hard-worn face filled with weary disappointment.
After that, she tried to rein him in, but that only inflamed his temper. She then tried more peaceful endeavors, like bringing home a fluffy golden puppy one day. Jubal loved it and thought up clever tricks to teach it, but it always shied away when he came near. At first he was irritated, but he figured that it was just a game, so he chased the dog instead of waiting for it to come to him. When he had caught it, he decided to try a new game, one he had thought up himself with the kitchen knife. Rather than laugh and enjoy the fun, like he did, the dog whimpered and cried, until he slapped it into silence. When he had cleaned up afterward, the puppy fled, but he found ways to catch it and play with it again. During their final game, when the dog's whimpers quieted and it went still, he grasped that he – little Jubal, good-for-nothing – had controlled, then extinguished the puppy's life. The realization filled him with a strange exhilaration, and he found that he enjoyed the power that he had held over the dog, power he could hold over people too. Even then his mother didn't – or maybe just couldn't – suspect him of such brutality; that was her final mistake.
At night he could hear the whispers more keenly, and they told him what he had no choice but to do. He crept through their new home, silent and unnoticeable as a shadow, and found her sleeping peacefully on the couch. She looked so beautiful, yet the voices urged him more strongly that she was too good for this world and needed to pass into a higher, better place for her.
She screamed when she saw him looming over her with a blunt object and began running. He chased her, calling to her that everything would be all right. He finally cornered her; she was sobbing, but once he struck her in the head, she fell silent. Soon, he knew, her suffering would be over.
Hers didn't end, and his only began. Somehow, the police arrived at his house. They dragged him away as he told them not to disturb his mother, who should be resting peacefully.
His mother survived the night while he shivered in a cold jail cell. In the days that followed, doctors came and said that they were taking him away. Outraged, he tried to fight them, tried to tell them that this was wrong; he wasn't supposed to go away, his mother was. But no one listened, and he was forced to take a long ride away from his only home. Mother was there to say goodbye, but he could see the clear relief mixed with the despair in her eyes as she waved, knowing that he would never come back.
At the Alliance mental hospital, something changed. He learned right and wrong as pounds on his back that left him weak and sore. When he didn't do things how he was supposed to, he was beaten and drugged. The "treatments" were wrong, he learned, but he had no way of fighting back.
It was in the hospital that he realized that the whispers surrounding him came not from others' lips but from inside his head, so that even when he was isolated, they still taunted him at night. They grew louder and louder, sometimes overshadowing his thoughts entirely. Every time he did something, they would pipe up with "Does that seem right to you?" constantly debating his actions.
When he escaped, he knew what he had to do, what was right, after all he had endured. Maybe he had always known it, in the back of his mind; now it had come forward, so that this scheme possessed all of his attention like some crazy obsession.
Crazy, that's what he was. Glad he had a name for it; it made it less confusing when stated so coldly. He went out and learned how to kill people properly. He exercised his power often, because how could he improve if he didn't do it as often as possible?
Now that bloodlust has sent him floating in the bone-chilling cold of space, alone except for the voices and his last precious breaths. Some would say it's a fitting punishment for such a disturbed man, but then again one had to consider that even he was a human being, and that this was a terrible way for a man to die.
Does it seem right to you?
