Shadow Kid

Enter Matt. He is Seventeen years old. His red hair shines like flames in the light. He hates the light. It hurts his eyes. Matt is an outcast. He has no friends. He’s too strange, people whisper, with his black painted fingernails and too-large black clothes. He doesn’t talk to anyone, just sits quietly, drawing. No one is worth his time to talk to. He is constantly picked on, day after day. He is being picked on now. He sits in class, drawing as he usually does. The teacher is out today, and there is a substitute. The other kids are taking advantage of this. Two of them, Todd and Anthony, decide to bully Matt, their favorite pastime. They smack him in the head, sneering at his clothes and nails. They tear up his beautiful sketched drawings, and they laugh. Matt has finally had enough. He jumps to his feet, and, faster than thought, punches them both in their stupid, sneering faces. He feels the cartilage crunch beneath his fist, feels the warm crimson liquid coat his hand. The sub chooses to look up in that moment. Matt is given after school detention for three hours. He is also given two vows that “there will be payback”. After school, he sits in the dark classroom for the required three hours.

It’s peaceful, sitting there with the lights out. Matt feels safe, and regrets it when the time runs out and he is told to leave. He stands, shouldering his backpack, and with a sigh, walks from the room. The second he steps through the front doors of the school, he feels two pairs of hands latch onto his shoulders. His backpack is ripped from his shoulders, and he is shoved up roughly against the brick wall of the school. Anthony and Todd are laughing. They are going to make him “just like everyone else”. Anthony pins Matt against the wall, while Todd takes his right hand. Todd is holding a pair of tweezers. Matt struggles, but he isn’t strong enough. Todd takes the tweezers, and begins to slowly tear off Matt’s fingernails, one at a time. It is unbearably painful. Matt screams, and doesn’t stop, even when Anthony punches him in the eyes to silence him. Rip, thwack, rip, thwack. It becomes a painful rhythm. It lasts forever. Matt can no longer see, the damage to his eyes is too great. He can still feel though. Every painful moment. He feels it as his last nail is torn from his left hand. He is still pinned though, and he feels something cold and hard and sharp pressed just above his upper lip.. then, there is a jerking motion, and a searing pain through both of his lips, all the way to his chin. This is repeated four more times. He is then allowed to slump to the ground amid gales of laughter.

There are fading footsteps, then nothing. Matt lays there quietly, and then begins to giggle. He laughs, through the pain unable to stop. Everything is dark. He tastes blood in his mouth, and feels it on his fingers. HIS blood. Now he is angry. He wants revenge. It is long after Nightfall at this point. He stands up. He is still blind, but he uses his other senses to make his way to Todd’s house, still quietly giggling. He crawls thru the window, and stand beside the bed, running his bloody fingers across the sleeping form until he feels a pulse. He clenches his fingers down, and with a gruesome ripping noise, rips out Todd’s throat. He then rips off his Fingernails, one by one. Matt finishes by carving a roman numeral five into the chest of the now lifeless corpse. It is found that the same thing has happened to Anthony. Several more bodies were found mutilated in exactly the same way, always with that roman five carved into the bodies. One boy went completely missing altogether. His name was Matt. These murders are still under investigation. People reported strange sighting in the night, of a boy with Hair darkened to black by the lack of light, with bloody hands, five dark cuts across the mouth, and two black holes where eyes should be. The boy trailed shadows, as if his clothes were made of them. All anyone could talk about was this Shadow Kid, who came at night to seek revenge on those who bullied others…

Sleep well children.

You know who you are.