SNIPE!

I'm hiding in a library, high on a shelf, as if I'm a book. The place is like a grocery store, with cashiers and stockers. I point with my finger as if it's a gun and I'm a sniper. I "shoot" several of the workers below. And I'm certain this has a real effect on them: the curse of a slow, wasting death!

But they don't notice yet they're cursed. So I do it more blatantly. Make gun noises for each shot and "kill" a couple more people. I recognize Marie from my old job at the Stanford library...

And I'm not killing at random. Nor are these personal enemies. I'm assassinating these people for political reasons!

But I'm so guilty now--it's so damn easy--that I come out in the open and shoot them down with my finger, like a bratty toddler. No one cares. No one notices. Yet the casualties are real. Why don't they stop me?! Someone stop me!

I feel out of control, evil; if I can do this, anyone can. Kill with curses--with impunity. Where are the cops when you need them?

My God, are they going to let me kill everyone in the store?

Stop me, before I snipe again!

AWAKE

I wake in the night and write a few notes:

• Assassinations: I met a guy in the library today who was researching the assassinations of leaders of the Black Panthers; rival factions or government agents?
• Library shelves: Someone on the committee that chose art prints for our staff area told me "When I compare what we chose to your art, I felt our choices were awfully safe and dull." Actually I liked them--Navaho prints by RC Gorman. How did I get that role as judge of her taste? Do other co-workers see me as their token Wild Man, prodigy, dreamer? I occasionally DO feel they're tame--but I thought the art group did a good job.
• "Stop me..." Today I read "What the Maid Saw" by Yasutake Tsutsui. Nanase's a telepath, knows every family's secrets, but how can she speak up? She has to make all her moral decisions alone. A horrible burden. She wanted someone to stop her... but there WAS no one. I know the feeling!

CHANGE

Night. On the run. I shot them down with my finger, left the bodies lying there in their own blood, and fled. Now I'm with my writer friend David and a couple of other nightcrawlers. I can't go home to my parents' house; that's where the shootout really happened! I can't be the one to discover the bodies, I want no connection between me and the killings. At first I feign interest in staying out all night, and then later, when I get tired, I pretend exhaustion, an abrupt crash. Exaggerating.

An all-night store. David wants money for gas and I want to stay on his good side so I can crash at his house tonight and someone else can find the bodies... I have almost no cash but I do have my checkbook. I buy a half gallon of milk, pay with a check, ask if $10 is okay, get change. The checker says "Sure, with ID". I do it, then wait for my change, he says "Didn't I give it to you?"

Confused, I fish thru my pockets and there's $8 and some change all right. But... that's what I had BEFORE. No way to prove it though. The bastard is cheating me!

Polite smirk. He knows. No accident.

But how did he know I had just that amount?

Like Nanase the psychic maid! He can read my mind!

Then he knows about...

I silence myself and leave, defeated. Can't let him know more... he may already know.

GUILT

I wake in bed. And stay in bed! As I have been for two or three days now, malingering! This is my old bedroom in my parents' house. I dare not open the door... I don't want to face the bodies.

Yet... I hear my family's voices out in the hall... my sister Althea is complaining about how my parents treated her daughters while she was gone, spoiled them? Not clear. But if there'd really been a mass murder in the house, they'd hardly be arguing about babysitting.

So I didn't kill. No one's going to arrest me.

Might as well get up. I suppose I should have guessed from the way my memory changed from wishing them sickness to bloody shootings... that the murders were just another guilty dream.

And then I wake again! Staying in bed for days out of guilt was just a dream, too! Not to mention being back with my parents. Yeesh...

What am I going to do about this guilt? Guilt that I've unconsciously ill-wished people out of stifled anger... it makes me unassertive in daily life! LET myself be cheated out of small things, just because I'm guilty of the secret crime of getting mad.

Which, in a world full of actual murders and assassinations, no one else finds criminal at all.

At least it's only me! You've never cringed in guilt for simply feeling what you feel, right?

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