The tears of twenty years finally burst from his eyes. Everything. His whole life, his whole sorry, miserable life, came at him like a flood. He was not okay, and he could not stand it anymore. All the compromises, the insults, playing the part in this long slavery he had endured . . . there was nothing left.
He had been broken long ago, but he had kept the pieces together. Now those unseen fissures finally ruptured. In every way but literally, he fell apart. His soul was like some porcelain doll shattered and dashed against the floor, crushed under the mechanistic heel that had ruled his whole damned life.
In that moment, nothing mattered. There was no longer any God, or Heaven, just Hell. He had not fallen into the harsh bareness of atheism; one might say he had sunk into the fetid mire of agnosticism, but it was worse than that. He was unmanned, and only the animal remained. The good, the one star in his heaven, faint and flickering all these years, had finally burnt out. Only darkness. There was no future, no present; there was only the past, only darkness, only Hell.
He had never been a saint, but after that day, he became the Devil. His one good, his sole purpose, was to make the world as black and poisonous as his heart. Damn him, if you like, but give him his due: he had not made himself. He would have been nobody, a man like any other man. He would have married someone, worked somewhere, loved his children, and died quietly and happily, had he the chance.
The tears washed his cheeks while his piteous sobs intermittently broke the silence.
Tale Told 
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