Trrembling time

If I killed him swiftly no one would ever know.

If I stirred without caution without contemplation… If I took my claws to his throat as was my plan, if I tossed my humanity, my doubt, away from me like a used cigarette then perhaps this could work.
Maybe I could endure, if I could do this one tiny injustice.
If I performed this one small transgression.
It wasn’t that difficult to fathom now was it.
To preserve my own life, I would seize his.
It was understandable, the struggle of all living things.
Heh.
Living things.
My hands felt weak, they shouldn’t have trembled in the slightest, but blood loss had rendered me fragile. I needed to proceed swiftly if I were to do the deed as the Americans say.
It would only take one well-placed strike. My talons would assure that his veins would be severed. Then all I need do was feed.
Austere.
Primal.
You can do this. Quiet your psyche.
You are not human, not anymore. You are beneath them.
Below them.
You have become an advocate of hell. Now you must adjust or continue to suffer.
I can hear his heart. Its steady and powerful, settled in age, not too young, not too old to serve the body as it always has. The unappreciated machine. The core of life just as the brain is the core of thought.
I steadied my footing, I lifted my hand, my blood blue within my chest, my lips an arctic blanket over my teeth.
One blow, and then heat and warmth and comfort. One blow.
Oh wistful temptation!
My body ached, my eyes burned, my heart was silent.


I couldn’t do it.


I could not cut the one thread of humanity I had left within this lifeless body carved from Hell‘s black ice.
I refused to give up all I had established and understood.
It’s a trying instant realizing that there is no God for you any longer.
No one who cares in a vast friendless universe, that there is no paradise, no cloud nine. It’s all a distant fairy tale for you.
I shook, constitution ailing, but fortified I turned away from him, back to the skylight with which I had pierced the protection of my prey’s dwelling.
I let the wind sweep me in its phantom arms, the darkness encompassing itself around me in a vice; I stepped backwards into empty air.
I am devoid of sentiment and therefore dropped as hopelessly as gracelessly as an angel cast from heaven.
I knew nothing but that a young child’s frightened countenance abruptly appeared peering over the balcony ledge.
Coldly I watched it grow smaller and smaller by the minute, disappearing into the fleeing night.
It elicited from within me a tremor of fear.
My hand would have been forced; it would have been a child’s blood staining my hands.
Perhaps someone was studying the world from deep within the unfathomable breadth of the universe. Examining me.
And mirthlessly laughing.


*******************************************************