Inside, two opposing principles create a marbling, an ebb and flow of grey area. One night I chose to move with a certain sobering moral, to flow with a particular darkness that resides in all creatures.

Wavering, drained, I felt the darkness pull a sob from way down deep, as if the night mirrored my heart and my insides. Following the obscurity was meant to recollect ancestral ritual and perhaps with experience, it will.

This first time, however, the black sky wrapped me in cold and ripped away the tension and adrenaline seething through my veins until I felt an unbearably heavy emptiness.

There was nothing left in my hands but the weight of the gun.

Her eyes had shone black before me; they had been deeper and brighter than this night.

That richness was extinguished with the clench of my hand, my fist around the barrel poised at the top of her adorably small skull.

Stale…

Her eyes were suddenly stale but the night was indifferent. It was the same night that had existed since the Beginning.  Gentle gurglings were the only notes that played on the silence as he sliced her throat to let the blood run.

Her tail twitched like a grotesque, comforting reminder that my own fingers brought the swiftest end to what was once wholesome.  I could have disintegrated, atom by atom, into the nothingness of that night, into the emptiness of the universe, and not a star would have noticed. I was wrong about me:

The blackness is everywhere and I am a killer.