I felt again the oaken handle in my hands. I turned toward the hammer noises; face flushed with tears, jowls open and twitching as I squeezed it, wide-eyed and beyond all reason.

I walked the way a man may right before his own execution—before the concerns of the world have left the crude carriage of flesh and bone that vessels a spirit ready for voyage.

All it would take was one committed strike. His skull would split like firewood. All I needed was for his back to be turned and his pink brain attending the last shoe it would ever contemplate.

For all his conquests, he was to be ended at the hands of his son. He deserved this, and he could be buried next to Mother, as I would surely dance in their ashes.

I turned the corner and gazed upon his back.

His head was hunkered low. Behind him I, his son, wielded a farm tool like a frontline pikeman. I always picture this through the eyes of some nonexistent spectator. That tiny moment in time haunts me, the image of us.

Killing had been an obligation of my means of obtaining animals, and some of my more risky ventures into the city bore me witness to many faces of death.

But for reasons I didn’t understand, my grip loosened. I was slipping from the midnight-garbed avenger to the terrified little boy.

I found myself filled with fear—worse, indecision. I begged for my rage to return to me, and with it the strength to carry out this monumental deed.

I wondered for years what my father’s reaction was when he finally turned to see a lone pick laying behind him in the beaten grass.

Without as much as a sack of grain or change of clothes, I ran away from the barn, the house, the district, my life. I ran until the dirt turned to stones and wheezed as my heart burned from exhaustion. I finally stopped at the base of my and Somyellia’s abandoned house. Molested by the sweat and grime of my flight, I laid myself on its doorstep. At some point I lifted myself and slugged up the stairwell, finally lying on our animal hides. The house creaked and the assorted city clamor carried me off.

I don’t know how long I’d been out, only that when I awoke I was enshrouded in full darkness. My father still lived, probably having not yet risen a hair’s suspicion over my absence. The mixture of grief and shame prohibited my rise. Sitting on the floor, I must have looked like a man after a fight lost outside a last-stop inn.

My eyes were adjusting to the black.

Peeking out from our blankets was a purse Somyellia had left behind.

An urge prompted that I crawl forward. Much to my hopes, I found inside this purse a small pouch of opium. I had partaken of it with her before. Small inhales here and there were enough to scramble the mind and titillate the senses, putting me in with sprites of the forest and pinprick demons that pranced and danced on and in me.