While the world my family knew ended quickly and quietly, mine started abruptly. With a scream, a loud, blunt-force show of raw power. I wished for the exact same oblivious end that everyone else seemingly had. As soon as I had been awoken by the clasped, cold feeling of a stranger’s hands around my neck, my newfound instincts kicked in as easily as if I were riding a bike, or reaching for that far-off, first breath. Ever since that morning, it became harder to recall details about my life at home, before the anger and the panic.

​For the first few days, I ran. I ran from house to house, forest to monument, away from all those angry faces. My bedroom, house, neighbourhood and town would quickly become replaced by the greenery of the British countryside, in all its harsh and bitter beauty. The shrieking. The putrid smell of rotting, and the never-ending bellows of hunger from my stomach. It all began to dictate my every move. Where the absence of a home once hung over my mind like a disease, desperation soon graced me a distraction. A divine gift from God.

​People I once knew were replaced by buildings, and old words etched into them were not yet overtaken by angry faces. Frozen and feeble, my scream lay dormant, like a church mouse hiding desperately away from the Vickers scornful mousetrap; an apt comparison in hindsight. A small, burrowed hole in the ground would do, a cupboard if I were to be so lucky. No matter how much my stomach wanted to scream in unison with those faces, I never let them see me! For the desperation and survival I felt on that first day were all that I was left with. All I could depend on was that quiet voice in the back of my head that grew louder and louder as the Old World grew quieter and quieter. My fragile mind and weak stomach eventually led me running back to the cold church walls, which I tried so desperately to escape – the swarm of angry faces bursting from its entrance. Stained glass shattered. Turning a place once acting as a beacon of faith into my own catacomb.

​Months now seamlessly merged into years as I foraged for the scraps the burdened and grey of the world saw beneath them. The blonde mop of hair I once had now lay tangled and knotted, my slippers and dressing gown that accompanied me away from my old home had long since deteriorated and been replaced by abandoned items, once owned by nameless faces. Some were donated by groups that took pity on me and took me in as one of their own. Yet, I never felt like I belonged. Their sad faces, stained clothes, and jittering eyes told me I was nothing more than a commodity of the Old World to them. My name would always change, my hand always held – I was cradled like a baby.

My hatred for them grew as each day came to a crawl. I saw them as weak and unfit for a world that forced me to adapt. Why were these idiots, with all their years above me, grovelling to a world that had nothing left for us?

​The voice of desperation and survival, my constant companion, helped me wade through the late nights. It promised me a simple thing: through the aching of my feet and the pain rooted deep in my black teeth, there lay a purpose.

Whoever or whatever had brought those angry faces, clenched fists, and mighty screams into my world had done so to train me to spread the word. The word of violence and resentment that made me the man I am today. Yes… Yes, this felt so right. A surge of purpose now thrashed through my body like a bolt of lightning. Pathetic cretins, old and unworthy – the washed-out dregs of the Old World, resistant to the anger’s blessing: the same red-hot burning light which I awoke to staring at me as a young boy.

​

And so, as the night went on, the leader of our group told his tall tales of hunting and old stories of the Old World to keep the unworthy entertained. I lurked behind him, back to the house he lay lodged in. While everyone else lay asleep on the grass, huddled in tents, he went to a large house further away. ​I stood above his sleeping self, lying atop the bedcovers. A small gold wedding band and framed photograph lay on the opposite pillow next to him, perhaps another pathetic offering to the Old World? Who knows. I struck. My hands, mud and dirt buried under the fingernails – these dreaded fingers that were still my fingers after all – clasped around his neck. His eyes bulged open as he shoved me away to the ground.​

The moonlight beamed bright as we locked eyes, his bloodshot red as he panted greedily, gasping for every last bite of air. I, on the floor, my black teeth aching as I bared them – my eyes, circled in mud, pierced his soul with a voracity for retribution. To finally give back to the world that had made me who I was.​

Locked into a standoff, he reached for a gun, yet my knife was quicker. His time on this earth had ended swiftly and painfully. Yet it was not satisfaction I felt, but rather bitterness.

​Bitterness that I had been forced to use a weapon of the Old World in order to exact the retribution the voice of desperation had instructed me to carry out, however, where a mistake had been made, an opportunity for redemption was never too far away.

​

A small boy, clutching a blanket, looked on in fear just beyond the bedroom doorway. His watery eyes greeted mine as the fear he likely felt coursing through his veins rattled on. As the bloodied body of his father now lay slumped at my feet, the knife in my hand fell to the floor in a hard clatter as I slowly approached him.

​

I held my hand out, not in order to hurt him, but instead to offer the one thing I never had. True and honest help. To navigate this world we found ourselves in.

​

I would fashion this young boy into an instrument of hatred, like me, as punishment for this old fool’s ignorance of the world around us, redemption for myself using an Old World weapon, but most importantly… as a gift. A gift to the angry faces, I would raise this boy as my own and others that should cross our paths, and we will together become the fingers of the mighty fist which anger will use to exact his wrath on the world of man.

Edited by: Hannah Masih