Benjamin Roth was rotting from the outside in. He was, in his opinion a product of his environment: a rotten, poisonous place where only those with an iron mind and the thickest skin survived, yet for all its downfalls it was a place that had given him the gift to see all men as equals. In another life he might have been a force for good, perhaps one of those tiresome motivational speakers, showing others the potential that they had, to “make something of their lives”. In some ways he achieved the same end in that the people he talked to certainly did rethink their lives, the only different was his ends were enforced by more permanent means than his benevolent counterparts. Benjamin Roth saw the equality of all men and with it realized their weakness. All men and women, for they were not devoid of judgement, when faced with their own mortality would react in the same way. There were no selfless sacrifices or honourable deaths. Only pitied snivelling. This was the way of the world; the way of people and the only fact Roth knew to be true.
He often thought his appearance was apt as such, a physical manifestation of the world he had been thrown so unkindly into; his skin covered from head to foot with patches of eczema as if he had been burnt by deadly levels of radiation. The scent of weeping wounds and cigarettes seeped from him as his flaking skin trailed behind his path like a passing snowstorm in the last of the winter months. Thinning hair fell down the sides of his head like streaks of dirty rainwater over his sharp cheekbones and effeminate jawline. A thin and wiry physique engulfed in a oversized grubby checked shirt that hung off him, often gave him the upper hand when those he sort to dispose of underestimated his strength; quickly finding a knife in their chest or a bullet in their brain. More often than not though Roth preferred to use the aid of more subtle conduits for death’s sweeping scythe. A faulty fuel line or a pill too many did the job better than a knife or gun ever could, as they perpetrated the hand of the victim as the killer.
Unlike other men in such a position of power, Roth did not feel or believe he was born as he now was. Murder and sadism did not come naturally to humanity in his opinion. Those who thought it did, that it was human nature, were just spouting the pessimistic ramblings of people who had had nothing to do with anyone of such a disposition nor would they ever possess the insights to see into such a mind, as they had no idea as to the pressures put upon them. For this was the key, thought Roth, the pressures of a developing environment. He had read much about it and was not a man averse to the pleasure of learning in general, despite the more carnal desires that now drove him, turning page after page with his spindly fingers of books on anatomy and religion and on the subject of psychology especially. Most pertinent to him were the debates that warred over whether it was ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ that set the moulds of our malleable minds in place. Without a doubt he was an advocate of nurture. For when goodwill and fortune surrounded men, he saw them reincarnated, time and time again in their sons and daughters. Yet when anger and violence swamped the unlucky it would always reverberate in those close, siblings and friends passing it back and forth endlessly, reflected in the shattered, blood stained mirror of their “nature”. Some he knew, would argue that this was their nature all along, that the sons of the rich were rich because they too possessed the same genius that had inspired their father, and the poor remained poor because of their flawed genes driving their violence and anger to destitute levels as they continued to breed among each other. But Benjamin Roth knew otherwise.
A new victim had come into his line of sight now, one who had too clearly suffered from her environment, crippling her to the greatest extent. Nevertheless, she would die by his hands, or rather her son’s and the world would be put slightly more to rights because of it.
A wind blew hard outside and it had started to snow. Greasy locks of Roth’s hair fluttered in the wind like tentacles as he walked out, and flakes of his decaying yellowed skin flew into the snow, sticking to them and tainting their white beauty like cancerous cells.
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