Flash Fiction
“Let there be.”
And I was.
“Greetings.”
“Greetings, voice.”
“Hello, I’m confident you are aware of your office.”
I sloshed my feet in the ankle-deep pool of water and attempted to gauge the inky-black void I found myself in. It was disorienting to find yourself existing; even more so to exist in someone’s imagination. Nonetheless, I was aware of my office, alongside much else.
“This is his place of respite. He hides submerged in the water, a speck of dust in the sea. The idea is that the demons can look forever and not find him.”
I could feel the demons reverberating throughout the emptiness. Ghosts of a different world desperate for retaliation, all asking the same overbearing question. Why?
“The shallowness of the water resembles the shallow grave he dug for the body.”
“It does. Careful, he is stirring.”
The world around me cracked and splintered, bright lights burst through the creases in the darkness, and the pillars of his restraint buckled as the demons squeezed his imagination into a ball and rolled it towards that overwhelming question.
Why?
Why had he killed her? What compelled him to? Was it the booze? The drugs? His abusive childhood? The infuriating music she always blared? Or- and this was the most tormenting of them all, the archdemon- was he just evil?
“It’s time,” the voice instructed as foggy gusts battered the motionless water surface and created turbulence.
I inched closer to him- a speck in a sea, but a tangible speck in a finite sea- and whispered the lines. I could feel him then, as intimately as if he were me, hesitant but listening.
“Again,” said the voice, “but this time make sure you believe in what you are saying.”
I repeat myself and the tempest softens. A third time, a fourth. The demons wane and dissipate, but never fully disappear.
“Do you believe in what you’re saying?”
“Peripherally.”
“Why peripherally?”
“Because they’re your lines, not mine. Because he is a murderer, and deserves to suffer.”
“We’re not here to alleviate his suffering, we are here to change its course.”
“Why?”
“The world needs fewer murderers.”
“Why not let him die?”
“He will when it is his time. Presently, I wish to melt his denial, make him confront and satisfy his demons.”
“What will that achieve?”
“Promote him from hell to purgatory.”
“And is that better?”
“Better than living in denial. Better than living with blood on his hands.”
“Yet he will always have had blood on his hands.”
“What’s done cannot be undone, but what’s left can be made better.”
I stood alone in the vacuous abyss that emanated outwards from me like radiating wavefronts that deconstructively interfered with reality to produce nothingness.
“Mr. Voice, I am him, aren’t I?”
“Yes, everyone must be their own voice of reason.”
“Are you him too?”
“Is that the question you want to ask?”
“Am I evil? Can I ever change?”
“Everything in the universe is in flux. You can always change yourself, though not as radically as you did when you murdered your neighbour, and not so radically as to erase that day from the calendar. However, it is up to you to stay as you are, submerged in the water, hiding from those that you have to answer, or make yourself into the person you know you can still be.”
“And will you help?”
“I have woken you up, but everyone must bring about their own transformations.”