Without a shadow.

The smallest of things can have the greatest of impacts or something like that. When you enter someone’s or something’s path, it changes, a course corrected, an idea lead astray. It is within saying that everything we do impacts our surroundings. One like myself can try to minimize the damage of my actions or increase it, but with, as they have said, but with every action, there is a reaction.

Frozen in a moment of happiness, dimples at max relief, the picture flexes from the pressure given by my grip. I read the rest of the documents, the trial as one may call it. I write down the things I should remember and stuff the paper somewhere close. I pull my coat tight around myself in an attempt against the soon to be cold. Sticking my hands in my pockets I clutch my device and leave the warm room.

I freeze before the door, stuck in a familiar motion and an unfamiliar one. About to do something, I swear, when the door opens with an old fashion whine, light and heat pours from the opening of all places. “What is the hell you want?” My Russian feels rusty and unpracticed. “Your time, I am chuzak, please your time.” He stares blankly at me as the blizzard roars a hateful roar behind me. With one more look up and down he scoots his hold of the frame and lets me in, we all make mistakes I suppose. I try to wrap myself in my arms as he slams the door from the frigid air. “It is that of cold.” He says in his unbecoming English. I nod as he gingerly throws another log into the already bellowing fire.

The fire licks, as fires do. I want to speak before he does, but once my mouth opens he is giving sound. “I only give two reasons why you are here, it be none of them I am welcoming of.” I rub my shoulders as he finishes speaking, giving a look to the ground, to the wall, to anything but him, I explain “My reason, my reason are that of not welcoming, this is true. I come to lay down sentences. You must know, I have made sure, of what can be the crimes.” My Russian seems worst off then I remember. He notices and gives me something to drink. “We can only know for what is coming, but how it gets here is another matter.” He lifts the blue steel cup as he finishes talking. We clink together the cups and drink to what is coming. “Aren’t you afraid?” I ask as I set the cup down on the dirt covered floor. “Afraid, a fear, I know my body, it is not you I fear, I am not scared of ghosts.” He finishes by putting his cup on his knee. “Can I ask you something then?” I ask as my Russian becomes better to worse. “If your questions can manage it.” he answers in a tone of apathy. I stare for one, maybe two moments into his eyes before I speak the words “What is it then, you welcome me in your home, aware only phantoms and monsters would come at an hour like this, and yet you aren’t afraid? My face in yours, how can it not be the possibility, the consequences in which I can take everything, it does not scare you?” He blinks once, then once again. With a tired hand, he reaches for mine. It feels cold as it closes over my finger tips. “What is it but nothing, how can I be afraid of nothing?” The glint in his eye shines as he pushes the blade towards my throat.

Kicking in one moment, in the next instant, he is on the ground. He coughs pulling himself towards the fallen knife. With formative years and the willpower, I kick it into the fire. I stare at him, boot ready to crush, a crunch. His eyes begin to water, his spirit in retreat, I draw myself back. “Do you know of what your crimes are?” I ask staring down at his shivering body. “Do you know?!” I yell this time. He begins to cry as I pick him and his chair off the floor. “Do you know what your crimes are?” I ask again. Pulling the paper from my pocket, I begin to read off the crimes. “Mass genocide, molestation of the weak and feeble, cannibalism…” With a lip half covered in blood and spit, he interrupts me. “I know, I know… I am nothing but a terrible. I cannot answer for all of them, but my guilt’s are many! But there are things that needed and need to be done…” I spit into his face as he begins to bawl. Feeling disgusted I kick the chair over once again. “Do you know, do you know how morally wrong you are?!” I yell in a questionable question. He tries to wipe the tears and spit from himself. I wanted to grin, so I do. Coughing once, then he coughs again before speaking. “You American’s with your morals, with your beliefs of freedom. What is it but just that of unwillingness to understand how little you are. All of you so little, without much, but we, we have better than morals, it is not strength you get from morals, strength is for the…” Enough was said as I push my boot against his open mouth. He screams a little, a scream of fear, afraid to die I guess.

I scrape the scum off my boots as the wind from the east slaps against the small cabin. Looking at the mess on the floor, remembering what he did, then of what I did, I vomit. With every action, there is, I guess, a reaction.

-Karl