Firmly grasped, the knife slid across the table, dragging his fist along with it. Ed didn’t want to do it, not at all, and complained to himself like an annoying 5 year old with an anger problem turning red in the face being told to takehis mess of lego scattered pieces and put it back in it’s original box. Even being as strong willed as he was, as stubborn as he was, as do-the-opposite-of-what-you-tell-him he was… whatever voice compelled him to maneuver the knife towards him, seemed to be the more convincing of the two sides. The knife was that of a more quality steak knife; not the sharpest blade of the bunch, but certainly sharp enough to do it’s job.

BLEAAAAAT

What a strange noise for an animal to make. Is it communicating with us? Is it talking with itself? Is it just trying to squeeze out a shit? Trying to understand the loud, audibly disturbing, and anything but soothing noise that finds its’ way through the vocal chords of an animal that butts its’ head against inanimate objects every few moments for whatever fucking reason may as well be putting yourself at the receiving end of the headbutts. What an odd representation for an animal’s call. A dog “barks.” A cat “meows.” A goat “bleats.” Perhaps it’s just universally known that goats are the most abnormal and superficially soft-brained animal, so much so that Webster-Merriam called a quick poll in the room and asked, “What noise does a goat make?” while the responses were probably similar to What does the Fox Say? … they decided that it was too intelligible a noise for an animal that holds the same anti-evolutional traits to that of a lemming, someone combined a cough and a sneeze at the very same time which actually forced that person to have an aneurism and drop dead on site. Police came to the scene after a responsible adult dialed 911 and doing their job, the officials on site had to rule out any sort of foul play before the autopsy came back (no one knew it was an aneurism at this point). They questioned the others in the room extensively and checked his overly seasoned cheeseburger, tater tots, and Mountain Dew for any contaminants. Frank… that was the dumb bastard’s name, wasn’t the healthiest or really the brightest bulb in the box, which was ironic since he was on the dictionary’s board for creating words, was notorious for overeating. People that were close to Frank always knew that his shitty eating habits would be the death of him. Mid 40’s and the blob of a man had trouble breathing while walking up stairs. Detectives, before they could go back to their families, needed to watch the security footage with one of the administrators, as was the protocol. Watching from start to finish, which was a lengthy few hours of mundane dictionary gobbidygook between people that gave a rat’s ass, felt similar to writing each of those words on the chalkboard 50 times in detention, found absolutely nothing but a fat, dumb man dropping to the floor like a brick off a 2nd floor windowsill. When the moment of Frank’s death finally did come across the screen and headphones, they were subjected to the abrasive noise he made when he seized up mid-bite of his burger in which he had compiled the tater-tots onto the ground beef slop with his other toppings (mayo, bacon, lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion rings, etc. etc.) and slurped on his green acid of a soda, all that could be heard through the headphones was an intrusive sound of “BLEEEAAAAT!” before his overweight dumpster of an organ holster dropped to the under-carpeted conference room floor. At that moment, it was decided that in memoriam, this was the word for the sound of what a goat makes. Bleat.

The music stopped. The commotion that the room was once full of screeched to a halt. All eyes seemed to turn to Ed. Everyone was watching, waiting, and commiserating. There was no feeling of sadness, fear or empathy in the air, but more of a sense of “Good,” surrounding him. Good in the sense of “Good riddance,” not the type of good that would be misrepresented as positive. He couldn’t hear the thoughts whirling around him, but he could feel them cutting like the thorns on a rosebush.

A fruit fly. An inaudible speck in the vision floated between his eyes, buzzed to his nose to a spot where he couldn’t really see it, but he could feel it. The black dot had to be as small as a grain of salt, and not one of those grains of salt that would sit on a warm, greasy soft pretzel that you find at a street cart, but more like one of those grains of salt that come from the shaker and make you wonder whether or not the salt even came out, then your food is over salted burning your tastebuds. It was just as annoying too. From the nose it started to buzz towards his coffee cup. Ed wasn’t one to always be distracted… in fact, he was usually a pretty focused individual. Sure, he could procrastinate like the best of them, but if he was wrapped up in something important, especially something like taking ones own life, he wouldn’t veer from the task at hand. Though, at this moment, was something sacred being intruded upon. Not the moment that was revolving around the fact that a sharp enough steak knife was nearing towards his abdomen underneath his own direction. Not the fact that he was looking to spill his intestines all over his bought-on-deep-discount designer jeans that he would wear for weeks on end without washing in the middle of a restaurant with supposed children, families, witches, and goats about. Not that he was going to leave the love of his life, the girl that had helped him stay the course of becoming a better person, the woman that had grown with him for the past 10+ years, the female that constantly kept his impulsivity to act afool within check, permanently just because he was having a DebbieDowner Moment© that trapped him in a thought-loop similar to that of that song you can’t stand but runs through your mind on repeat regardless of how hard you try to sing another tune… yeah, that one.

What the fuck am I doing?

The fruit fly continued to buzz around the coffee cup and he could feel his temper flare. It was resilient. Silently buzzing around the cup that held one of the few things that he could truly enjoy from moment to moment; a sip of the juice of the gods. The heat of his emotions rose through his body from the depths of his loin, reaching his skull it started to spin him upside down like repeated somersaults or cartwheels on a gymnastics mat. Either his hair started to grow or steam was shooting through his ears in a cartoon fashion.

“Fuck yourself,” whispered the maneuvering and hovering black dot within his vision. Shock ripped through his body like a static charge released from shimmying around upon a very shaggy carpet all day in socks that had far too much fabric to them, like an amount of fuzzy fabric that would make you feet sweat and if unwashed would leave you with athlete’s foot between a couple of toes.

He swatted which drew it closer towards his coffee. He pinned it’s flight path and clapped his hands together hoping to find its carcass smudged across his palms. He waited for it to settle on the table for a second before violently slapping said table causing everything to shake and rattle, even the knife he was holding moments ago.

“I’m going nowhere. When you kill me, I’ll only be replaced by another… and him? Another. And so forth,” the fly taunted him.

There was only solution… to kill them all.