Day 216 - Values Story

Values Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

It started with a mugging. It wasn’t well planned. It was more of an experiment just to see if he could do it. Kip found out that he could and that he sort of liked it. It wasn’t the money; there really wasn’t that much money. He wasn’t a thrill seeker. It was more about the sickness in his stomach, the fear of getting caught and the painful disgust he felt with himself once it was all through. Somehow that was the part that he ended up liking and wanting to recreate.

Kip wasn’t really a criminal sort. He was antisocial, but had always played by the rules growing up. He respected authority and didn’t have any need to rebel and exhibited no violent tendencies and never seemed to embrace immoral proclivities. Kip was brainy and thought too much. He had too few friends and always felt the need to keep proving himself to the friends he did have. He never felt comfortable with other people and had a hard time accepting them and being accepting of himself. Still, he was hardly a criminal.

The muggings continued, but soon Kip decided to try greater and larger crimes. He tried vandalism, defacing and destruction of property. There was no money in it, but he wasn’t after money.

At one point Kip decided he wanted to test himself and see what he was capable of. He had little respect for his fellow man and late one night decided that whatever boundary he wanted to test and push, it should involve some sort of confrontation and exploitation against them. He didn’t set out to be a criminal, but it was something he thought he could get away with and live with. He didn’t think he could actually handle murder or rape or anything requiring a great amount of physical violence.

Muggings and destruction of property seemed fitting together because they both required a lack of respect for other people or other people’s things. That he could handle.

He didn’t expect to change, but that was out of his control. Mugging someone wasn’t enough. He grew numb to the experience. Breaking something wasn’t enough. The act lost the sense of revenge against an uncaring universe. Soon muggings turned to larger scale theft – either from stores or from homes. And the destruction of property grew and grew until he was leaving the locations he stole from in total shambles.

Later he began burning properties to the ground. He didn’t care about what he stole anymore. He became much more fascinated in the destruction of things. He had no value system anymore. He saw no worth in the places he went or the things he saw. All he had was a blind rage towards them and the desire to destroy them.

Kip murdered a man in an alleyway behind the man’s jewelry store. Kip wasn’t after the jewelry or the money. He wasn’t after the destruction of the store either. It had all lost its effect. Kip destroyed a life to try and feel something again. He thought that should have been the ultimate sickening feeling of power and pain. He knew other people valued life above all other values, so he expected to feel the most from this act.

He felt nothing. He was empty inside. Dead. Either he never had anything inside himself or he had destroyed it long ago. He didn’t know which. He had no value anymore. He was no value. He no longer knew how to recognize a value. And for that he felt a twinge of sadness and pain. He knew it was over. There was nothing left.

Kip turned the gun on himself and felt a moment of sickness in his stomach. There was a brief second of doubt, a slight stirring that made him think that there could possibly be something human still inside him. But whatever it was, it was small and weak and shallow. He was tired. He had hurt for so long and so often that he just didn’t have any pain left to feel. He knew he could pull the trigger and he knew he wouldn’t feel anything. And maybe that was the only thing stopping him. He had only ever destroyed things that someone somewhere placed a value on. If he had no value to himself, then there was no real loss or destruction happening. There could be no value in the act.

He put the gun down, not sure what to do. He was lost for the first time in a long time and had no plan or purpose or next step. He knew his crime spree was over, but he had no idea what his next step could be.

After a while, Kip wandered off. He was gone and aside from the few lives he had hurt, he would be forgotten. He wandered off and it was like he had never been there to begin with. He was just a broken shell, hardly worthy of being called a man, just some shadow wandering off in the night somewhere.