Kin

by Kealan Patrick Burke

Everything is preplanned, a fact that might not upset humankind as much if they were let in on the secret, if they were offered tantalizing glimpses of what the future holds. But no such previews exist, and so man flails blindly through the dark, hoping to avoid the holes through which he has watched so many of his fellow man fall.

"Monsters like you...don't last long. Someone will put an end to this."

every second word that spilled from his mouth was a lie, his promises glass birds destined to shatter sooner or later against the cold hard surface of reality.

A casualty of wealth would become a casualty of war, one way or another.

The kids coming up these days, and most of their parents, had no idea what the world was waiting to do to their children, no concept of the depth of evil that permeated the world ready to corrupt the naive.

Living is hard; Death is easy. And there are no answers on either side.

The sorrow was worse because it came unbidden, and unlike the anger, which demanded action, pain, a release of any kind, sorrow asked nothing but for him to just be still while it spread through him like a cancer and drained his resolve, his will to do anything but sleep and feel sorry for himself.

"I'm going to kill them, Beau," he said, nodding slowly. "Every fucking one of them. And I don't care what happens because of it. They had no right to do what they did."

"It's the nature of people, I guess. We're designed to grieve and mourn, and do what we can to move on."

Finch was his own country, the government unstable, the population volatile.

It had felt as if he were grieving for people who had died long before he'd come into the world, and had found himself forever unfulfilled, as if he'd been born without some vital component necessary for total happiness. He'd drifted, seeking people more emotionally deficient than himself, for in them he found a kinship. The shared unhappiness did not cancel either out, but neither did it exacerbate it, and this was how he lived.