“Old age is not for nancies,” Carl’s Great-Grandfather had told him all those years ago, between coughing up black bits of his lungs in his handkerchief.

It was a betrayal, that’s what it was. Getting put in a home! Forty-three years of Carl’s life to support a family that left him here to die alone. The last time he saw them was almost ten years ago, now. Ingrates! Almost ten years in this hellhole!

There was no reason for it. Sure the old brain had slowed a bit, but he was hardly senile. Limbs all working… strong, even. Organs still performing their assigned tasks. No incontinence either, thank you very much.

He felt like an alien among these dying people. How he hated them all… Frail, diseased, weak and stupid with brain rot. They were pathetic.

At first, he justified killing them as putting them out of their misery. He would have wanted someone to do the same to him if he started shitting his pants at the dinner table, he lied to himself. The hatred was the real reason, of course.

It was certainly easy enough to kill them. A nudge towards the stairs, a little bleach in an iv bag, some extra pills in the tri-daily dose. They were here to die, anyhow, why would anyone suspect his help? He must have sent fifty of the sorry schmucks to Hell by now.

It was actually TOO easy. A revelation came to him as he lifted the pillow from his formerly snoring neighbor’s breathless, peaceful face. What was the true root of his hatred of his fellow inmates? Disgust for these pathetic souls, or the frustration and impotence he felt about his own situation?

As satisfying as he found these simple little murders, how much more gratifying it would be to eradicate his entire family, those foul thieves who had stolen his life from him. His son, his court-appointed “caretaker,” in the home Carl had built with his blood and sweat… his son living there with his fat-ankled wife and moronic children. If his back hadn’t gone out reaching for the carving knife at that last Thanksgiving dinner, things would have been different.

Easter was coming. The Resurrection! The family would have an unexpected guest for Sunday dinner.

Seeing his house again was like a strange dream, it had been so long. The years had streamlined it in his mind; the mailbox, the shutters, the crack in the concrete… how could he have forgotten so much? As he bent down in the dark to dig out the house key he had left under the brick next to the front door, he shit his pants for the first time since childhood, liquid feces trickling down into his shoe. It was at that moment he knew that he would never be returning to the home.

Once, in his youth, Clifford had dreamed he would someday be famous. He wasn’t sure how or why, he only knew that it was fated.

Being a career celebrity like Paris Hilton or Charles Nelson Reilly would be perfect, but those gigs were hard to get.

At first, he suspected he may find fame through sports… basketball, perhaps. However, his vertical growth stopped at five foot two, foiling that possibility.

Music was his next calling. His music was loud enough that no one really noticed he was tone-deaf, but having the rhythm sense of a sick ferret in a washing machine prevented him from ever having wide appeal. His recording career was abandoned, leaving behind a legacy of one unlabeled half-blank cassette tape.

Acting was the next obvious choice. He moved to Hollywood, and started wearing sunglasses all of the time. Getting into movies he found surprisingly easy (or at least into movie studios), but his tendency to ad-lib during scenes that he wasn’t a part of kept getting him eighty-sixed from sets.

Having exhausted the obvious choices for acquiring fame Clifford considered some less obvious ones. Politics was only for ugly people. He wasn’t smart enough to invent something. He had no talent for art.

His epiphany came to him in the early hours of a warm winter evening. Without hesitation, he grabbed the semi-automatic from the basement closet, gently set it in his Shaquille O’Neal duffle bag, put on his ray-bans and headed for the mall.

Whatever did happen to all of Hiram’s friends, anyhow? High School, the best years of their lives, already 16 years gone… they won the state championship, the STATE CHAMPIONSHIP, and what does he have to show for it? Trophy on the mantle, sure… looking at it now makes him so queasy sometimes he literally vomits in his mouth. He can’t seem to take it down, though.

The recruiter from the state college had him at the top of his list. It would have all been different if it wasn’t for his knee.

The last of his buddies must have left Duncanville over five years ago now. Losers. Why did they leave?

Well, Ben won’t be going anywhere now, at least. Ben and his family were just passing through the “old stomping grounds.” Stopped in the truck stop and Hiram didn’t even recognize him, he was so goddamn fat. Ben, however, recognized Hiram right off (hardly a change other than the deeply receding hair line). “Hiram! You’re still here! Good to see a friendly face!” the doughy mass gurgled uncomfortably.

Seeing Ben obese and domesticated was just too much for Hiram. Ben had been their goddamn quarterback… their LEADER… and now he was just a sack of shit. They had been brothers… warriors! This moon-faced, jiggling monstrosity that stood in front of him was a sick abomination, an insult to the memory of what he had been. Worse yet, it ruined the fantasies that he had long harbored of their reunion. Hiram found he could no longer picture young Ben as he was in his mind without having it blotted out like an eclipsed sun by this fat caricature of his lost beauty.

How Hiram had missed him… Ben’s return as an unrecognizable slug (with a wife and kids, no less), was not merely disappointing, it was a betrayal. He put him down quick, from behind, like a horse with a broken leg. He never knew what hit him. Hiram sobbed and mourned his lost friend as the tire iron solved the problem of Ben’s bitch and brats.

It was a mess, sure, but the law is sparse and incompetent around Duncanville. Hiram saw their local Barney Fife, Officer Earl the next day, and damned if he didn’t help him load the bags of cement into his blood-splattered pickup.

Hiram would mourn Ben until the day he died.

There was still hope for a happy ending, though. Maybe Craig would pass through town, Big Craig the linebacker, just as fine and strong and beautiful as he had been that night under the bleachers…