The blade pressed against the man’s throat, its icy edge made his skin tingle. His chest rose and fell in quick, shallow breaths. His wide eyes, darting around. Sweat beaded on his forehead, trickling down his temple. His lips quivered as he whispered, “Please…Mack.”
A slow grin spread across his attacker’s face. “Any last words?” 
The man swallowed hard. His hands trembled as he held out a small crumpled piece of paper. “Just… just give this to my family.” His voice cracked, and tears spilled down his cheeks, leaving glistening trails.
His captor glanced at the note, noting the shaky handwriting scrawled across it in uneven lines. For a moment, there was silence, only the sound of the man’s ragged breathing filled the space between them. Then, without hesitation, the blade slid deep. A strangled gasp escaped the man’s lips. His body jerked once in the bed, then sagged. The light in his eyes faded. Silence filled the room.
Calmly, the attacker wiped the blood from the knife and folded the letter with care, before putting it on the table beside the bed. No fight, or struggle. Just a quiet, inevitable end. Without another glance, he turned and disappeared through the fire escape, vanishing into the night. They call me a monster. Butcher. Savage. Serial killer.
The media feasts on fear, twisting my image into something unrecognizable, painting me as some faceless psychopath who prowls the streets, slaughtering the innocent. They flash headlines drenched in blood, calling me a nightmare, a stain on society. The police, in their pressed uniforms and self-righteous speeches, call me a coward who preys on the weak, a predator lurking in the shadows. They spit my name like a curse, swear they’ll catch me, and promise the public justice.
Listening to them, I’m something out of a horror story, a demon from the pits of hell, an unholy thing that should never have been born. But they don’t know a damn thing. They don’t know what true suffering looks like, how it lingers in the eyes of the forgotten. They don’t understand the kind of pain that doesn’t just pass but seeps into the bones, becoming part of a person until nothing else remains. I know. I remember. It is seared into my brain, carved into the deepest parts of me, a wound that will never heal.
Mom was first. Then Dad. Cancer devoured them from the inside out, eating away at them piece by piece, turning them into shadows of the people they used to be. The doctors smiled their rehearsed, empty smiles, patted my shoulder, and murmured words like “palliative care” and “pain management,” pretending those phrases meant something. But we all knew the truth. Those were just euphemisms. Nice, clean words meant to make people feel better, to hide the ugliness of reality. They were dying. Slowly.
Drowning in agony, trapped in bodies that had become their own prisons, waiting for the inevitable. They begged, whispered, cried, and pleaded for it to end. To let them go. But the law said no. The law, with all its self-imposed morality, declared it wrong. Immoral. A sin. The hospital, with its pristine white walls and sterile air, cared more about numbers than people. They needed their survival rates to look good, so they dragged out the suffering, keeping my parents alive just long enough to count, to fit neatly into a statistic. I have seen real evil, and it wears an expensive suit and white coat.
I just sat there. Helpless. Watching them rot and waiting for a miracle that never came. The night Dad died, the machines beeped softly around him, an artificial heartbeat, a cruel imitation of life. He clutched my hand, his fingers frail and cold, his breath rattling in his lungs. He was too weak to lift his head, too far gone to do anything but whisper.
“Mack,” he rasped, his voice barely a breath, “if I were a dog, they’d have put me to sleep.”
Then he was gone. I never forgot those words. Not now. Not ever. I see them again in every person who begs for my knife. The unfortunate ones drowning in pain, suffocating under the weight of their own failing bodies. The ones trapped in endless cycles of torment, where every second is a battle, every moment a cruel extension of suffering. The ones the world ignores.
People walk past them in hospital corridors, glance at them in waiting rooms, pretend they don’t exist. Society tells them to endure because the law has decided their suffering isn’t enough. It isn’t tragic enough, or painful enough. It doesn’t meet the criteria for mercy. So they are left to rot.
But I hear them. I see them. And when they ask, I listen. Some weep with relief when I grant them escape, their tears falling not from fear, but from gratitude. Others smile, even though the pain, their lips trembling but their eyes shining with something close to peace. Some press letters into my hands, shaky, desperate words written not for me, but for the families who never listened. For the doctors who prolonged their agony just to keep their numbers up. For the world, that turned its back on them.
The police hunt me, but no one talks. There are no grieving mothers sobbing for my victims. No outraged fathers demanding justice. No crowds calling for my capture. Because the ones I took were already lost. To them, I am not a killer. I am mercy.
Like the man I just killed. His name doesn’t matter. It never does. What mattered was the way his breath rattled in his lungs, each inhale a struggle, each exhale a wheezing, painful reminder that his body was failing him. The way his skin clung to his bones, his strength long since stripped away by the disease eating him alive. Terminal pneumonia, the doctors said.
Three weeks. That was their estimate. Three more weeks of drowning in his own lungs, of gasping for air that would never fill him. Three weeks of waiting for the inevitable, of being forced to suffer because the law demanded it. And when the time came, he didn’t fight. He didn’t beg for his life. He only asked me to deliver a letter. I granted him peace. Now, he is free. And I vanish into the night, searching for the next soul who calls for mercy.
I work in medical records. I sit behind a desk, scrolling through endless files, drowning in data that no one really sees. To most, they’re just names on a screen, numbers in a system, cases to be filed away and forgotten. But I see them. I search the patient database, find the terminal cases. The ones who have no hope, no future, no chance. The ones who have been sentenced to a slow, agonizing end, not by a court, but by nature itself. Their fate is sealed, written in their bloodwork, in their scans, in the words of doctors who have already moved on to the next patient.
I go to them. I sit at their bedside, where no one else bothers to linger. After a while I ask them the question no one else will. Do you want release? Some hesitate, clinging to the last threads of life, still hoping for a miracle that will never come. I don’t push. I never push. That is their choice alone. Some think it over a few days. But others don’t hesitate at all.
Their eyes, sunken and weary, tell me what their lips have been too afraid to say. While their hands, weak and trembling, reach for mine as if I am salvation itself. Their voices, hoarse and broken, whisper the same plea I have heard a hundred times before.
Yes.
And so, I do my job. Society needs a villain, doesn’t it? They need someone to hate. Someone to rally against and chase. A person to blame for the uncomfortable truth they don’t want to face. Allow them to call me a monster. Let them paint me as the boogeyman, the faceless executioner lurking in the shadows. Let them build their cases, set their traps, and whisper my name like a curse. I don’t care. Because at least I see these people as more than statistics.
I treat them with compassion, not as numbers to be filed away, not as problems to be managed, but as human beings with voices that deserve to be heard. At least I listen. And I grant their final wish, a swift, painless death. A kindness their doctors will never give them. The same doctors who swear an oath to do no harm, yet prolong suffering for the sake of morality. The same hospitals that claim to care, yet refuse to let the dying go because keeping them breathing means more funding, more research, more profit. They talk about ethics while counting their money. They stand on their pedestals, pointing fingers, calling me a killer, while they let people waste away in agony, pretending it’s mercy.
Who is the real monster?
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