My Favourite Ruin

Prologue 1 (Elijah)

Some people collect stamps. Others, memories. I collect silences. Those seconds when the air stops moving and the body finally realises it’s over. It is there, in that interval between life and nothingness, that I truly breathe. It’s not about pleasure—it never was. It’s a necessity. A fever that grows inside until it burns away what remains of my humanity. I’ve tried to ignore it, put it off, rationalise it. But the impulse always wins. And when it wins, someone has to die.

Choosing tonight’s victim was simple. A forty-eight-year-old man, an ex-convict, convicted of abusing an eleven-year-old girl. He served six years. He walked out smiling. Society calls him ‘rehabilitated’. I call him an outstanding debt. I waited for him to come home, watched the routine ritual: beer, television, cigarettes, laughter at the same sort of programme that exploits naked women and underage girls dressed up as adults. He hadn’t changed. None of them ever do.

When I went in, the house smelled of mould, nicotine and feigned regret. The knife I used was sharp enough to leave no time to scream. Blood ran across the grimy floor and pooled in the grouting. Death has a sound that few notice — a sharp crack, a final gasp, the sound of the body giving up. I should have left straight after, but the plan failed. In the garage, his car — my escape route — was guarded by a Doberman. The animal looked at me with a loyalty that only a dog is capable of, and for a moment I wondered what it means to be loyal to a monster. He growled. I backed away. I don’t kill the innocent, and the dog was merely a guardian of a dead man.

So, I set off on foot. The early morning chill pierced the fabric of my shirt, and the dried blood was beginning to harden on my wrists. The city slept, indifferent, as always. I like this hour — when no one sees you, and sins seem to lose their shape in the wind. The bridge loomed ahead like a streak of concrete over the void. I walked slowly, with the distant hum of cars and the metallic sound of water lapping against the piers.

It was then that I saw her. Sitting on the parapet, her feet dangling over the abyss. Her black hair fell in long strands, broken by a single white lock at the front — as if death had left its mark before its time. Tattoos covered her arms, designs that seemed to tell a story no one wanted to hear. She stared down, motionless, as if talking to the river. And I, covered in blood, stood there, watching a woman about to do what I spend my whole life trying to prevent in others: to die of her own volition.

For a moment, I thought of walking on. But there was something in the curve of her body, in her silent surrender to the wind, that paralysed me. Perhaps it was curiosity. Perhaps it was the same kind of hunger — only inverted. I kill to feel that I am alive. She wants to die to stop feeling. And, in that precarious balance between right and wrong, between the killer and the suicide, I knew that something had changed. The bridge was no longer just an escape route. It was the point where two ruins met.