Dream Job

The time had come around again. Whether a man filled his wallet by keeping books for a corporation, lawyering, contract killing, or pinning back the loose skin on aging faces, the truth remained the same: Money talks. Morris Shotwell, while plenty unique in modern-day America was no exception to the rule. His craft was his bread and butter - and his craft he did perform, albeit as little as he could. His work did not please him in any way, other than maintaining his livelihood, the way of life to which he had grown accustomed.

Over the years, Morris suffered many conflicts in regard to his chosen career path, both ethically and physically. But ultimately he had concluded with the justification that no man could choose his passion any more than he could choose his parents or the place they chose to hunker down and force new life into the world. In this case, a new life wrapped in the morbid irony of growing up to end the lives of a good many unfortunate men and women. Some people thrive in mathematics, so they become accountants, engineers, scientists. Some have a natural understanding of pitch and melody and become singers and musicians. Morris though, he could take someone’s life in his hands and mail it, same-day shipping to the afterlife with relative ease. Morris Shotwell became a Contract Killer.

Doubt and guilt swam through his head like a shoal of starving piranha, fighting against the current of his dwindling attempts at justification so they could feast on his brain. He kept their ravenous appetites at bay by tossing occasional and likely excuses. (If I don’t do it, someone else will. The target had to have done something pretty shitty to land a price on his or her head. I'm making the world a better place, a man’s got to eat, etc…) As had become a matter of course, he simply had a job to do and he was going to do it. He’d catch a flight to somewhere a good chunk closer to the destination and drive to work from there. He’d vet the target. He’d kill the target, quickly, quietly, and be gone long before anyone knew even a single hair on the poor bastard's head had been out of place. There was a time when Morris had a very strict code of occupational ethics that made the job a bit more complicated but ultimately kept his REM cycles intact. The code had inched steadily toward self-preservation, leaving ethics to the good defense attorneys all across the great U S of A. Morris studied his face in the mirror of his master bathroom and couldn’t quite stifle a laugh from escaping his mouth at even the thought of the word “ethics” as he stood on a heated tile floor in his tastefully excessive home, “ethically” paid for with the blood and tears of people he had really never met. Such ironic naivety would curl the lips of a rotting corpse into a smile. Ethics simply could not exist in Morris Shotwell's head and that fact has been slowly unwinding the fabric of his self-esteem, but hey, heated tiles for Christ's sake.

Morris turned the hot water knob on the sink and cupped his hands under its warming stream. He forced himself to keep his hands under the flow of the water as it got hot, hotter, near scalding. He filled the bowl of his hands with water and saw the complexion of his hands changing from the normal white, pasty color to a bright red as the blood vessels dilated and opened up trying to cool the burning. Focusing his mind on the pain and nothing else, he splashed the scalding water into his face and slammed his hands down on the rim of the sink basin, closing his eyes tight and gritting his teeth against the pain. Nothing tethers a man’s mind to reality like fresh, searing burns. The things you learn when you’re on the fast track to the loony bin. Morris smiled at that thought, in spite of the red hot throbbing in his face. After he was adequately cooled off, body and mind, he partook in the morning ritual of men everywhere: The shit, the shower, and the shave. Morris shaved with the cool and casual control of a man going to work the morning shift at a credit union. He didn’t tremble or shake, his eyes didn’t plead with him in the mirror to reconsider his career path as they once had. They merely went about their preordained business, and did what they were told. Just like Morris. He looked at himself in that same mirror after he was fully dressed in his favorite get-up. He wore an all-black suit and tie, black pants, black shoes, shined to the nines, and made the light from the bathroom ceiling dance around the leather tops like sunrays on a wet blacktop. Morris remembered a time when he liked, no loved the way he looked in this, his favorite suit. Confidence radiated from him and reached out to touch passersby, turning heads in desire or envy or both. Morris Shotwell was never a superficial man by any stretch but he didn’t mind that confidence. But the days of liking how he looks seem to be somewhere in the rearview mirror with his ethics book. These days, he loads confidence into his Taurus .45 fifteen rounds at a time and it didn’t turn heads, it stopped them from turning. Permanently. After completing the robotic morning rituals with a shave and two slices of dry wheat toast - one had to watch one’s health after all - Morris gulped a glass of orange juice and picked up the duffel bag he had packed and left by the front door the previous night. He would not learn the destination for his day’s work until after the journey began so Morris made it a point to pack conservatively with 3 full changes of clothes and all the hygiene products a man would need for a weekend out of town. Bag in hand, lights switched off, Morris Shotwell opened the door and prepared for the overstimulation of the Queens borough streets.

Morris had never really gotten used to the substantial sensory difference between his hometown of Corwick, New Hampshire, and New York City. The sounds, the smells, the sights were close to that of complete opposites. The industrial smells and hyperactive goings on of Queens never failed to make him homesick, forcing memories of the smell of burning leaves and bird song he knew as a boy in Corwick. Longing for that familiar and cherished sense of serenity, especially on work days, Morris had developed a technique to prepare himself for the harsh reality of the city in which he now dwelled. He would prepare his senses for the rank smell of garbage festering in the heat awaiting its ride to the landfill, the sight and feel of passersby, staring and judging a thousand people at a go. But Morris was struck with calm delight and the pleasant ache of nostalgia as a familiar scent filled his nose. His brow furrowed in confusion as he turned from deadbolting his front door, fully expecting to see the crowded city street. He was rendered speechless and paralyzed by what he saw: the street where he had grown up in New Hampshire. Clean air replaced the industrial stink of smog and quietly replaced the frantic noise of city life. From across the street, the Shotwell’s neighbor, Mr. Huff waved to Morris as he had so many mornings growing up.

“Little Morry! You workin’ hard or hardly workin’?” Mr. Huff called to Morris in his usual good-natured condescension. Morris closed his eyes tightly and rubbed them with balled fists, trying to clear the vivid hallucination from his sight as if it were a lash that had gotten stuck under his eyelid. When he opened his eyes, he still saw Mr. Huff, now with a confused look bordering on concern spreading across his face as he turned and re-entered his home. Morris looked down at his hands and realized that not only had he seemingly been transported hundreds of miles from Queens to his hometown, but 40 years into the past as well. While he closed his apartment door as a middle-aged contract killer, balding and grunting whenever he bent over, he emerged as a young boy, wonderous and ready to make the coming day a fun one.

Morris stood looking at the street where he started so many childhood adventures, blinking his eyes, rapidly trying to cut off the hallucination and return to reality. He looked to his right toward Canal street and saw only the familiar New Hampshire town. Turning to the right, he started down the street, now partly hoping the hallucination would last and prove to be real after all. He relished in the light, the painless stride of youth, and found himself enjoying the sights and smells of home through the nose and eyes of a child. He started to smile and almost dismissed his entire life as a hitman in Queens as a dream; It sure as hell didn’t seem like reality to the boyish brain that now lived in him. Not only did he feel relief but a kind of jubilation as he strolled toward---

“YO!” he heard from what seemed a thousand miles away. In spite of the distance, the voice cut through his dream-like state and all the bustling life of Queens hit Morris’s senses like a jackknifed semi. The crisp, clean air of Corwick was replaced by the rank, industrial smell that he had spent years getting used to.

“Yo buddy, rise and shine. This ain’t yuh fuckin beddy-by time.” Said the man that was responsible for the exclamation that broke Morris' hallucination like a crystal bowl that fell from a skyscraper. He took a quick look around at the gray and gloomy street outside his apartment and let out a sigh of disappointment that should have been one of relief. He was in Queens, after all. The peaceful sensation brought by the silence and nostalgia of Corwick was violently shoved away by the drone of passing life and traffic. The man that snapped at him had moved on and rejoined the human high tide that was the New York City morning commute. When Morris was somehow able to accept the fact that he only imagined his complete immersion into the past, he exhaled through his nose and laughed in spite of himself. It was very strange, of course. But given the stress and mental exhaustion he felt due to his constant self-bargaining and justification attempts, he was able to accept it as undoubtedly strange, but ultimately possible. Taking a long, deep breath for good measure, Morris turned and started toward the subway terminal.

Morris stood on the platform of the station that saw the “E” train come and go day in and day out, taking people to and from their lives. He hummed a tune as he waited and flashed a contagious smile to the bored, tired people around him, very surprised and relieved that he was able to brush off that morning’s vivid hallucination so easily and completely. His good cheer was only returned by maybe ¼ of his fellow passengers but he brushed that off as well as he entered the train and took his seat. He gazed around the train car and found nothing very out of the ordinary until his stare reached the far left side of the cabin. There sat a group of six passengers who did not respond to his smiles and nods with obligatory social cues, but with the blank stares of corpses. Each one was bald and, as far as Morris could see, totally hairless. They sat with their unmoving hands folded in their laps and their heads turned to look at Morris. Above their kinked necks, their faces hung slack jawed and mannequin-still with their eyes unflinchingly fixed on his own. At first, all Morris could do was try his best to laugh them off as if he had been the butt of some elaborate joke meant to be caught on camera and posted online, propelling the video’s creator further into the web fame stratosphere. His desperate smile went on ignored as they continued to stare. Morris’s gaze slid from body to body looking for any sign that those cold, empty stares were coming from living, breathing human beings. He began to feel a slight fear rising like the mercury of an old thermometer as the gawking things became less human and more plastic in his mind. Panic began to threaten his composure as each of the gazing vessels slowly raised one hand with horny, claw-like forefingers extended that bore an undeniable resemblance to those of skeletons. As sweat broke on Morris’s forehead, the artificial-looking mouths of the ghostly passengers curved up in a series of sinister, toothy grins. Morris started, frozen and wanting to call out and ask them why they were fucking with him but not being able to muster any sound. A scream began to incubate deep in his stomach, rapidly growing and climbing up Morris’s windpipe; a scream that would make its escape and make him stand out like fire in the dark, attaching a red flag to all of his business for the day. He squeezed his eyes shut, just as he had done when he thought he saw his hometown outside of his Queens apartment. He had no hope that it would work any better than it had that morning but, for a wonder, it did. The gazing ghouls were replaced by two standards, carbon copy passengers that looked upon Morris with confusion and a hint of concern, using their eyes to ask Morris what he was so afraid of. He forced a smile to issue through the pale, clay mold that was his face and was met with dismissive judgment. Morris took a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans - some old habits refused to die - and wiped the fear sweat from his forehead and face as the train pulled into the terminal. Doubt began to creep into Morris’s mind and mix with confusion and fear of his hallucinating brain. Were they hallucinations? Was he losing his mind? And more importantly, would he be mentally sound enough to finish the job he had already accepted and set out upon? He didn’t know. What he did know was that it was far too late to care. He took a deep breath in and held it for a few seconds before letting it out and exiting the train with his duffel bag in his hand and a malfunctioning brain in his head.

Morris Shotwell weaved through the heavy foot traffic of JFK International Airport trying to remain as forgettable as possible. He told himself to focus on the job just like he’d done so many times before. No thoughts were to be spared for the (hopefully) temporary lapses of sanity and/or reality. The rest of the day was about one thing: the kill. “The last kill”, Morris’s mind told him, and he shoved the thought away as fast and as forcefully as he could. He was almost at the parking garage where he would leave the heavy flow of human traffic and find out where he would be traveling and the name of the unlucky person he would soon be meeting with. As he approached the garage, he told himself he absolutely did not see any of those dead-eyed mannequins from the train scattered throughout the soon-to-be travelers, standing dead still. Staring. Pointing. He repeated the thought over and over, believing it a little less at each attempt.

As he approached the top of the parking structure, he found the inconspicuous red station wagon that held his assignment specifics and approached it as innocently as he could manage. Even so, he feared the events of the day thus far had tinted his eyes with a glaze of panic that would surely stand out to passers-by as if his forehead housed a third eye. The station wagon’s rust-red paint glimmered in the sun giving it the sort of shine usually reserved for brand-new cars. A shine that made Morris feel as though he had once more been transported into the past. For a few long moments, he saw the wood paneling running alongside the car through the eyes of his childhood self, mistaking it for the station wagon owned by his parents when he was a boy. He saw the top of his mother’s head over the roof of the car as she got into the front passenger’s seat on the side opposite him. He found himself instinctively reaching for the back door, only remembering where he truly was when his hand touched the silver door handle. As smoothly and nonchalantly as he could, he slid his hand over the smooth wood paneling and opened the driver’s side door, closing his eyes as he entered for fear that he would see his mother in the seat next to his and receive a scolding or perhaps a backhand for playing around in the front seat when his father would soon be entering the car. After a few deep breaths - it seemed respiration was doing more for Morris than just filling his lungs that day - he slowly opened his eyes and turned the key in the ignition. He did not look to see if his mother was in the passenger’s seat. The normal routine was that Morris would retrieve the information needed for his job as well as a plane ticket but - for many reasons - today was different. When Morris opened the glove compartment, he saw nothing but a scrap of paper and one single key. It wasn’t often that he would drive to a job but it looked like that would become another unusual circumstance on an increasingly unusual day. Morris used the key from the glove compartment to start that engine and backed out of the spot. He shook his head to dispel the growing concern about the job. It was just a job. Just like all the others. He clung to that idea, repeating it on a constant loop in his head as he descended the airport parking structure.

When Morris reached a distance he felt was safe, he pulled the station wagon off the street and parked near a curb on the outskirts of the city. He once again popped the latch on the glovebox and removed the small, white scrap of paper that remained. A look of confusion spread on his face and a new pang of concern invaded his mind as he realized that, on the paper, there was no name or pictures of his target.

Morris once more felt a certainty sweep through him that hiscontract-killingg days would end with his current assignment. That feeling took hold of his attention so completely that he hadn’t yet read what was actually on the paper from the glove box. On the single sheet was an address and nothing more. An address that, once read, sent a fresh surge of ice water racing through his veins and a fresh sweat to take the place of the one that had just recently dried up.

“1248 Harper Road, Corwick, New Hampshire”

The address on the sheet was the same address he had imagined he was transported to upon leaving his apartment that morning: Morris’s childhood home. Putting the car in drive and pulling away from the curb, Morris surprised himself by deciding immediately that he would go to the address on the page, regardless of the implications. The strange events of the day along with the new addition written on the paper made him into serious consideration for the first time. And it didn’t take much consideration at all. He became nearly certain that he was losing or had already lost his tether to reality. So he clung to something he had almost made peace with over years of practice: his mission. Crazy or not, he would continue until it was no longer possible.

By the time Morris reached I-95 heading north, he was dreading the sights and lucid memories this five-hour drive would no doubt have in store for him. After all, he was on his way to the home he was raised in, fully prepared to end the life of whoever happened to be there. Quick and easy. Just like every other poor bastard that he had ended over the years. After all, no one he knew or ever heard of had lived in that house for years.

But today was not like the rest, try as he might to convince himself otherwise. Today’s death dealing seemed to be laced with madness and hallucinations so it seemed only natural that his short-circuiting brain would use the next five or so hours to really give him the business. But Morris was remarkably unafraid and he couldn’t fully understand why.

He always hated long car rides, so more than anything he was actually looking forward to the distractions his ravaged mind would provide. But as he thought that through, he found himself approaching the I-90 on-ramp and the last leg of his journey. He had no recollection of the last few hours at all. In fact, Morris would have bet every blood-stained dollar he had ever earned that he couldn’t have left the airport anymore than thirty minutes prior, let alone four hours and change. It was as if he skipped the entire ride in some sort of trance. Given the other weird and often concerning events of the day, Morris saw this one as a gift. A small part of his brain was sure that several hours' worth of broken thoughts and paranoia would have completed his descent into full-blown toys in the attic, off his rocker insanity. He exhaled through his nose in almost comedic disbelief at the feeling of gratefulness as he passed the welcome sign for the small town of Corwick.

Before he could fully realize the nostalgia of returning to his hometown after so many years of absence, he was sitting outside his childhood home with yet another sense that a chunk of time had passed him by without his knowing. He once more closed his eyes and gripped the steering wheel, willing himself to keep it together. He was about to let out a deep breath meant to calm him when a voice spoke from the passenger’s seat.

“Are you sure about this, Morry?”

A scream escaped his mouth in surprise and his head snapped to the side to examine the speaker of that voice. Denise Shotwell sat in the passenger’s seat in a white silk nightgown, smiling at her son. Her often beautiful hair, cherry blonde with a shine gleaming from every wave, was disheveled and looked, much like the rest of her, as if it had just been roused from a deep sleep. The smile on her face was one that Morris had seen time and time again when his mother was teaching him some sort of lesson in her own signature style.

“M-m-Mom? Are you rea… Is that really you?” Said Morris in a weak and trembling voice. He was shaking all over now and he felt a heavy flow of perspiration wetting his face and beginning to dampen his clothes. He shut his eyes tight against the disbelief.

“There’s no going back after this one, son. But a man’s got to make his own choices.” said the voice of Zach Shotwell, Morris’s father. When he opened his eyes to look, he saw his father on the passenger’s side and reached for the pistol concealed under his seat before quickly exiting the car. Breathing heavily and feeling his mind unraveling, Morris made his way up the sidewalk that led to his boyhood home. From behind him, he heard the voice of Mr. Huff beckoning him from across the street.

“Little Morry! Workin’ hard or hardly workin’?!?” Morris paid it no mind as he continued up the walk to the sturdy, blue front door. The welcome mat that his mother laid out read “FOOD’S READY! COME ON IN!” just as it always had. For an absurd moment, Morris almost knocked on the door before remembering what he had come to do. Smiling crazily, he took the doorknob in hand and turned it slowly.

He slowly crept through the doorway into a room that seemed to be completely dark, engulfing him in a pitch black that seemed to Morris to be unnatural and wrong. Morris held his pistol out in front of him with both shaking hands and turned to the right to face the room right off the entryway hall. His bedroom.

When Morris entered the room that he once saw as a sanctuary, he did so with shocking ease and steadfast certainty, closing his eyes to prepare himself for whatever was to come. Even with his mind threatening to take a hiatus from reality, Morris still felt himself enter the state of calloused, cold efficiency that comes along in his line of work. He felt the fear and disbelief take a backseat to the adrenaline flooding his bloodstream and thought about how many jobs he had completed throughout his career. He thought about his reputation among his colleagues and the legacy he would be leaving behind should he succumb to whatever waited behind the door. It seemed as though the ship carrying his sanity was hijacked and taken over; there was nothing he could do about that now. What he could do was make the most of the thin grip on reality he had left and do his job one last time. Morris resigned himself to that idea as he opened his eyes to the room.

When his eyes focused and saw the room, Morris surprised himself by letting the corners of his mouth curve into a smile. What he was looking at was impossible, of course, but with that being the theme of the day, he let himself enjoy the nostalgia that crashed over him as he gazed around the room. The room was exactly as he remembered it. The wooden rocking chair sat in the back left corner, stained a dark shade of brown that was almost black. The electric guitar rested on the wall directly behind his bed, mounted on two stands and spending its days collecting dust as a decoration rather than an instrument. The same scattered mess of paper and various writing supplies still lay on the desk to the right. Morris’s smile evolved into a laugh as he realized that even the room’s smell was the same.

“Yep, there it goes.” Morris said out loud through his laughter, “The straw that breaks the camel’s back. The whole kit and caboodle.” His laughter intensified until a tear streamed down his cheek and a soreness spread through his stomach. It felt as though there was an appealing and terrifying acceptance that clicked in his mind like the fastening of a seatbelt: the sanity ship had taken on water and it was sinking fast.

“What’s so funny, chief?” Said a voice from across the room, jolting Morris out of his state of unreality. He raised his pistol with the speed and accuracy of a gunslinger and had the new guest in his crosshairs faster than he would have thought possible considering the tornado wreaking havoc in his mind. The light in the room was very dim and provided a veil of darkness that hid the features of the new person and left him but a shadowy humanoid figure rocking serenely back and forth in the corner.

“Who the fuck are you?” Morris responded coldly, pistol ready to blow if needed. The figure didn’t appear to care in the least about Morris’s gun or his question. The shadow, still rocking back and forth let out a small sigh and stood up fast. Too fast. Impossibly fast. “Hold it right there or that chair is gonna be your coffin. Don’t tempt me. Not Today.” Morris said, feeling a vine of fear growing and creeping into his thoughts.

Before Morris could register what had happened, the shadow thing was directly behind him whispering, “Come on, you don’t recognize me?” Morris spun around and instinctively applied pressure to the trigger of his pistol. Nothing. No sound, no flash. When Morris looked at what he assumed would be a jammed pistol, he saw only his hand, curled around nothing but the air between the stranger and himself, the former still concealed in the darkness. Morris’s breathing picked up rapidly as he backed away, agonizing over the fact that it didn’t matter if he was 10 feet or 10,000 miles away, whatever this thing was would be there. Even so, he continued to back away until his back was pressed against the far wall of the room. Grasping at the idea that none of what was happening was real, Morris closed his eyes tight trying to wake himself up, desperately hoping he was just in an impossibly vivid dream.

For a few seconds that felt more like hours, Morris stayed back against the wall, eyes shut and waiting for whatever would happen next. The room was silent around him and he noticed that he could no longer smell the familiar scent of his childhood bedroom. A small pang of hope burrowed into his brain, almost letting himself believe that the trick of closing his eyes that he used to escape nightmares worked. Morris thought about how wonderful it would be to be able to write off the day’s events as nothing more than a dream. No time travel, no dead parents sitting in his car, and no hit job at all. In that excitement, Morris opened his eyes once more.

The first thing he registered was that he was now sitting in the rocking chair that sat in his childhood bedroom, surrounded by complete darkness save for a single spotlight directly in front of him. His room had gone the way of the 8-track and disappeared. Next was the man sitting across from him in an identical rocking chair, illuminated by the spotlight. Morris’s chair and the one across from him rocked in unison, creaking as one in their old age and breaking the profound silence of their surroundings. When he looked up at the thing sitting across from him, he could only smile and shake his head.

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Morris said, speaking to God or the universe or whoever was responsible for such a wonderfully insane shit show. The thing in the other chair wore Morris’s face like a mask that was all too real. Same clothes, same body, same fucking scent. Any second, he would be having a full-blown conversation with himself and all he could do was smile. Smile and accept that whatever was going to happen was going to happen regardless of how he intervened. He was there for the long haul, like it or not.

“Hey there, handsome. How’s it hangin’?” said the Morris thing in casual good humor.

“I’d bet my life savings on the fact that it’ll soon be hangin’ in a padded room. How ‘bout yourself?” Morris responded, oddly calm given the circumstances.

“I said ‘How’s it hangin’, not where's it hangin'.” But I’m doing quite well, thanks for asking.”

Morris could hear his own sense of humor pouring out of the thing’s mouth and let out a laugh before continuing, “I was already pretty sure I was an asshole but after talking to you for what? Two seconds? I’m sure of it.”

The new Morris responded with a passive smile that said he wasn’t here to shoot the shit, even with such good company. It went on, “Do you know what this day has been about? Have you been able to put together the puzzle of which you’ve been finding pieces all day?”

The smile and good humor left Morris’s face but he did not respond; Which he could see right away in the eyes across from his was answer enough.

“Well let me cut to the chase here. You’ve been killing yourself, Morry. Every job accepted, every bullet fired may as well have been aimed at you. You’ve been writing checks for years and years with your heart and soul as collateral and now it’s time to pay up.”

Morris wanted nothing more than to disagree. To tell this fucked up messenger that this day wasn’t a puzzle but a labyrinth with shifting walls, an elaborate story of a man losing his mind one hallucination at a time. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t lie to himself. Not the “himself” in his chair or the one across from him. The back of his mind had been screaming that truth at him every second since he accepted his first job and started taking lives he knew nothing about. He knew the piper was out there, waiting for its time to be paid; Now the time had come. The fact that it wore the same face was just an added punishment. Before he could muster a response, both rocking chairs abruptly stopped moving and the creaking of the shifting wood was once more replaced by utter silence.

“So here’s what’s gonna happen: First you’re gonna pick up that shiny gun in your lap.” And to Morris’s surprise, the pistol he had been carrying earlier reappeared, sitting in his lap like a harmless animal maneuvering to find a comfortable spot. “Next up, you’re going to point it at my forehead right around this area here.” It said as it used its index finger to tap the spot right between its eyebrows. “And finally, you’re gonna pull the trigger.” It listed these instructions with the casual nature of a man assembling a bookshelf and repeating the steps out loud.

Morris picked up the pistol before responding, “And what if I say no? You’ll force my hand with some of your magic tricks and make it happen anyway?”

“And now what would be the point in that? The ending of your own life by the hand of another would be nothing in comparison to the death you’ve dealt. The price you have to pay here is made equal to all the lives you yourself have taken by the fact that you must endure the agony and realization that the last target of your long and prosperous career will be none other than yourself.” It said calmly as if it wasn’t requesting a bullet be put between its eyes. “No no, should you refuse your punishment would come in the form of you living this exact day over and over again. No recollection of this or any of the other instances that you chose to ignore your debt. The debt you’ve irrefutably accrued over the years”

Morris wanted nothing more than to choose the “fuck you” option and considered doing so. What stopped him was the thought of how many times he may have already chosen that option only to land right back in the same seat with the same fucked up middleman that wore his face. He found that the thought of that happening, again and again, was far more terrifying than simply honoring the request of his counterpart.

“This probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway just to cover all the bases. If I kill you, I would also die. Is that about the size of it.?”

“Morry Morry Morry, there is no “me”, only you. You’re the one calling to collect what you owe. I’m just your own twisted fucking way of making sure that happens. Being you, I know for a fact that you have been dreading something like this happening since you took your first assignment, and with this one posing as your last, it’s your last chance to make it happen. Sure, you didn’t expect such an elaborate means of clearing your conscious but it’ll get the job done. No matter how many times you have the illusion of choice, this only ends one way: with you and I punctuating our conversation with a loud bang and a bloody mess.” Every word spoken further solidified Morris’s decision. “In reality’s terms, I’m willing to bet you’re back in Queens right this very second, sitting on your genuine leather couch and staring at the pistol in your hand. My only reason for “being” is to give you the illusion of aiming the gun at something other than yourself to finish the job that you have created.”

“You do it. Please just do it.” Morris said as he held the gun out in front of him as a morbid offering. He knew what the answer would be before he even spoke but he couldn’t help but try for it.

“I can’t do it. Even if I wanted to, I just can’t.” Tears had begun a course down the cheeks of both faces as Morris hopelessly, desperately awaited a reply.

“You do want to and you can do it. In fact, you must.” it said, casual tone gone now as if in fear of the choice Morris would make. Scared or not, the face that looked like that of Morris Shotwell slowly nodded up and down as the real Morris raised his pistol to the bottom of his chin. He figured it wouldn't matter much whether the bullet entered the brain in his own chair or the brain in the one across from him. After all, they both belonged to him.

Morris was trembling uncontrollably now in his fear and had to press the barrel of the gun forcefully into the soft skin below his jaw to keep it from shaking. He stared at the mirrored thing in front of him through the blur of tears that filled his eyes and rolled down his face. The double that his mind created nodded in approval with tears in its own eyes, clearly preparing to close them forever. Morris took one single deep breath and exhaled it slowly, tensing his trembling body.

“Some things are worse than death,” he said as he squeezed the trigger.