Michaels

Michael was experienced in this. In theory anyway. He had chosen the spot. He'd read and participated in the forums. He'd chosen his instrument and location. All that was left to do now was find them. He didn't know who they were. Most likely they were going to be the first person he hated that he saw. This wasn't an exclusive title, Michael was a hateful young man. He hated the Nazis and the Communists, he hated the Capitalists and the Philanthropists. He hated the Muslims and the Christians, the Hindus and the Buddhists. He hated everyone and anyone he saw. He hated them if they walked upright - those better-than-thou inbreds. He hated them if they walked sullenly - those worthless sewer people. In his seventeen years of life, he hadn't found anyone he didn't hate except himself to some extent. He hated his father - who worked too hard and didn't love hard enough. He hated his mother - who loved too hard and wouldn't ever work. He hated anyone with better skin than him, and being seventeen, it wasn't hard to find people who fit that description. He would've kicked the beaten and punched babies if he had ever been exposed to them in his sheltered life. He hated life and death equally, he hated the thin border between them, and the imaginary two dimensionality of it all. He loathed maths, disavowed physics. He would eliminate books and the concept of literature entirely in his dream world. A world of perfect truth and peace in its simplicity. It was a place Michael often visited, and far more appealing to him than the one he was forced into.
   
In his mind, he was a panther, or a puma. He was the death angel and the grim reaper. He was merciless. Cold hearted - no scratch that - he lacked a heart completely. That was him. Leaning against a grimy white wall, next to a leaky gutter pipe, he visually swept the streets. Looking, searching, hungering to find someone with a weakness: a heavy suitcase, a limp or someone distressed. After several minutes of scouring he had found a suitable target - there, walking across the street now, a man, strong in his late twenties, he would be felled. A strong prey for a strong hunter. Yes, this would be his dragon that he slayed. This would be his goliath. He composed and readied himself, thinking about the glory, excited embers glowing heat in his chest. The man was listening to music and bobbing his head along as he walked. Michael palmed the short kitchen knife back and forth, switching the blade forward and backwards, safely concealed in his sleeve. The man walked past him, oblivious, with Michael following. He'd slip behind him, wait until he was in an area with few pedestrians and no cameras, reach over the man's shoulders, so close he could smell the man's gross cologne and SLICK, he would fall. Michael snapped out of his fantasy and trembled a little. He was in his house still, combing back his knotty hair in the mirror; when the comb got stuck in it he nearly tore out a clump in determination. It wasn't that he was poorly educated - his parents were far too ignorant to understand that school was a scam - but that he had no taste for it. He knew that his teachers did not really know what they professed to be experts in. Those grifters, stealing and robbing his poor noble parents blind. One day he would get them as well. No, it wasn't that he was poorly educated, it was that the only thing that interested him was the Ancient Greeks. Oh how he wanted to be an Achilles, the red cloak, the tunic, glistening strong legs draped in dust around the ankles, a bronze helmet fitting over a straight greek nose. That desirability... even then, he'd settle to be an Ajax at the minimum. That time of men and heroes, of definitive action and incredulous defiance was so enchanting to him. He stood as straight as a spear - straight enough anyway - put on a hat, facemask, popped a few zits on his forehead and donned his heavy roughened jacket.

The air was jagged in his throat and hard to swallow - Michael had noticed whilst picking something out of his teeth with his tongue. It had been raining and the tar from car exhaust was clumping together to form thick particulates in the humidity. Kids on scooters rattled down the wet asphalt, flitting and swooping like swallows. He shuffled forward, his shoelaces soaking up water from the skin of wetness on the pavement. The walls of the buildings were smeared with dirt and the pavement was stained and blotched with the fluids of last night's parties, underfoot the ground rasped against the movement of the soles of his shoes. Cars thrummed on idle, their bonnets hot and wet and sick.