In a Moment of Clarity

Frank had made his decision. There was no turning back on this one. His mother had always told him that he was too reckless and too hasty, and she was right all along. She told him he was stubborn, but all these things Frank could look past now. From the moment the idea came to his mind, he became a new person and that person he remained; he promised himself that he would remain. From the moment he first thought that it would be a good and rational idea to kill a man, he became the new-and-improved, rational Frank, who wasn’t at all reckless, hadn’t a touch of haste and never let himself refuse entirely to move from his standing point. He became calm and thoughtful, allowed himself room for turning back and changing his mind, and thought every action through constantly before he made it. He was a better man.

The thought had scared him at first; he was angry and broken and haunted by burnt-in images, like light stains on the surfaces of his eyeballs, of his beloved fiancée, dead and bloody and once so beautiful, lying sprawled on his own kitchen floor. The memory itself was stubborn, something he would soon refuse to be, horrifying and unyielding to the extent of wanting to scratch out his eyes with his uncut fingernails, broken and sharp from itching and digging them into his palms and into the furniture and into the metal tables inside the police station. One haunted night alone, he thought to himself fleetingly, ‘I will kill that man’, and within mere seconds he was reeling back again from the purity and honesty of the internal statement, shaking with guilt. And then, in a sudden moment of clarity, he became that new man that his mother had always told him he should be. He ignored faith and pushed aside the unbound moralities of right and wrong, lost haste and settled on revenge.

He was a better man now.