The Reaper by Alan E. Ugalde Bermudez

I stare at the mirror. With horror I cannot recognize the face looking at me.

I have never seen the color of my own eyes. Just a black abyss where my eyes should be and where “they” live.

How they haunt me, torture me, mock me, abuse me.

Within them lies death, the death of myself, when once I knew happiness.

They remind me that every day is black. Every day is suffering.

I ask who is hiding in the abyss, and all I hear is laughter. All I see is black, black as death, black as putrid horror.

Where is the light that once showed through my eyes? Where is the happiness that was once there? I wonder, only to realize it was never there.

I ask who is there, I ask what they want. With the cry of a thousand eviscerations they reply. They reply “we are legion.”

All day long they profane everything I hold dear.

They wait and plan. They plan, they have been planning for an eternity. They have been planning my demise, but they fail to realize that it’s already here.

It’s been here. They already brought it here, but what they don’t know is I, too, have been planning. Planning their demise, which is looming over them as well.

I have begun to whet my sword for a mighty battle.

Soon I will attack the legion. Soon I will see them die at my feet.

Their decapitated heads in one hand and my sword wet with their blood in the other.

At last I am triumphant! At last they are dead! At last I can see my eyes! How they exuberate with light. I can see the color of my eyes!

They shine bright, they shimmer. They show me who I am, who I was meant to be. I was meant to be the reaper.

The grim reaper of mental violence.