Adversary

And Then I Bit His Ears Off

"They should've let us kill him."

"That kid shouldn't have the minor laws applied to him, he should be tried like an adult. If the law won't, I'll bloody do it myself."

Prate, twaddle, prate.

I could hear their piggy voices from behind the door of my cell, just with my normal hearing. It was the hallway patrol.

They were talking about how they wished they could kill me, about how "fucking crazy" they thought I was. I could say the same about them, especially with the killing part.

I could hear their footsteps approaching too, and then fade away.

I caught myself thinking about force feeding them with their own excretions, so that they could live like real pigs so that they wouldn't be like the useless and wasteful pieces of inactive human flesh that they were, wasting everyone's time chattering in the hallway when they could be chasing real criminals, like actual superheroes did, instead of spending all their time strolling around with idle chatter meant to stoke their own egos and doing next to nothing because they were too weak to actually go out there and fight, and then I thought about cutting their fingers off and then stuffing them back down their own throats where their lungs started so that they'd all choke to death and shut up, but unfortunately that wasn't going to happen.

"Blah blah blah," they said, and this went on for a few hours because they had nothing better to do, and then I probably forgot some of the things that happened because they really weren't that interesting or important to the terrible, tragic backstory I'm trying to tell you.

Now I wish I'd had a different tragic backstory, but if my memories get any more confusing, perhaps I will. "Don't worry, your life is only temporary", is usually what I'd tell you.

Eventually, after enduring the voices of the pig pen, I was left with a boring silence in my cell, alone with the bad lighting and my fantasies of dismembering vague visages of random pigs and painting pictures with their blood and entrails, which also got boring. Somehow, for some reason, I kept drawing pictures of waste bins in red paint made from piggie blood with all the heads of all the people from the orphanage piled up inside them. I didn't know why, but I still felt frustrated whenever I thought of them, like killing them, even just by remembering their faces, even if I knew I'd already killed them. Perhaps I was trying to bin the old memories. I don't know. Maybe I'd been hoping to pay them back properly, but I never got the chance to hang round and watch, because I'd been too busy trying to avoid getting caught or killed by cop guns. I was gonna kick the wall, but that'd only hurt my foot. There was nothing left to do there but think, and be oppressed.

I paced the room. I jumped at the door, once, just to test it, and it didn't even budge. It was like another wall, except it felt even colder, because it was made of metal.

I must have done that a few times, actually, or done what most prisoners did, which was next to nothing, and I can't actually remember what's been happening that well, so all this is just me filling it in for you. Just picture a poverty-stricken lad in a new place who's just been told that he's got no powers, except he does, and everyone he had ever known had hated him or not even noticed he was there, and no on in his life had ever stood up for him. But he was gonna prove the whole world wrong one day. I mean please, feel sorry for me, I'm innocent, and you all should have just treated me better.

Joking. This was me. A sane, sane, mass-murderous maniac with superpowers. I was only twelve. Or fourteen. I'm evil and proud.

Now, back to the story of how I was trapped and almost killed in my first maximum-security prison cell, also known as "And Then I Bit His Ears Off".