He went home that night and burnt his yellow legal pads, and snipped the film of the tapes, and flushed his paper-shredded strips of photographs down the toilet as he heaved drily.

The face of a true coward glared at him when his eyes tracked down his mirror. Defeat hung from his limbs like smoke, but it would not dissipate as the clock murdered the minutes. The fire alarm in his living room would not began to tweet shrilly, and his skin would not crumple like the paper of his legal pads had. Humans build their own cages; maybe this was his.

Jackson was ashamed, as well, and this was the worst feeling of them all.

His feet had crunched through the snow like grasshoppers, and the old adrenaline had curled up in his stomach as if it were really a bad soup. Food-poisoning, fear-poisoning. First, he thought he would do something, but then he threw up in the city's bushes, as if he was some relentless, pathetic drunk. The orange leftovers on his chin dried, and he rubbed them off with snow. It plucked away the realization of his excitement and transformed his face into something red and puckered and almost new.

After being washed with snow, how could anyone continue on and...and do what he wanted to do to her. Impossible. With regret, he stood to his feet and crept closer to her building.

It was very early morning, and the greys and blues of winter light had only begun to smear the sky.

He crouched awkwardly. His muscles and ligaments pulled painfully, tightly, and short: it used to be he could touch his toes, but that was an old dream now. Recuperation did not take kindly to Jackson; it bred laziness, which in turn birthed dissatisfaction, blame, and anger. Rich raw emotions that could be funneled, but all his were doing were spiraling, bloodied like a butcher's meat slapped on a grocer's counter. He was like watercolors: he could be washed away. No great person was admired for killing, no "man of magnitude", no martyr. Jackson had never really admired killers, and now he felt in danger of becoming one.

The silver idea that turned like a Christmas stew in his head was one of surrender, of defeat, of perhaps wisdom.

A police car drove down the road fast and he vomited again. This time it wasn't for him; next week?

He ran away home, with his tail between his legs. The very epitome of anticlimactic. His lips was broken open from where he had chewed it in nerves, and in the mirror Jackson realized what a Frankenstein monster he had become.

-fin.

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Thank you for reading this. I'm sorry for the incredible lateness of this - truly horrific writer's block.