It's always been an easy calculus. A collapsed building miraculously leaves no dead, and I only have to bury one body. A child goes missing and a hundred people walk away from a derailed train without a scratch. One family mourns so that a hundred can live. Simple. But today I have a harder choice to make.

​

I stare into the bloodshot blue eyes of a young man, barely 18. A kid, really. His wrists are chafed and bloody from where he's tried to escape his restraints. His tears have carved lines through the dirt on his face. I force myself to listen as he begs for his life. I've become so good at tuning out the cries, the begging, the screams of the people I take here. This one I need to feel. I try not to roll my eyes as he repeats the same platitudes they always say.

"Please" He says. He struggles to talk through the sobs. His voice catching in his throat. "I have a wife." He finally chokes out.

"No you don't" I tell him. He blubbers again. I try to keep my voice flat, my face neutral. I don't want to give him hope.

"I might," He says, trying a new tactic. "I might meet her tomorrow. We might have kids next year, you don't know. I'm young, I don't want to die please."

"You won't. Because you're going to die here." He falls to his knees sobbing.

"Why?" He wails. From across the room I pull his chains tight, pinning him against the wall. Then I move close and I wait for him to calm down and look me in the eyes.

"I need you to die. I need you to suffer, first. Because the universe needs balance. I can't just erase people's pain, I have to inflict it on someone else. The good new is you're not suffering for a hundred, or a thousand. People have been less lucky." He doesn't need to hear the rest of what I have to say, so I stab him hard in his abdomen. The knife is small, it barely makes it through his skin. He screams.

"I love my wife. She is going to die well after I am gone, and it will be absent any pain. That's all thanks to you."

​

As I wash the blood off my hands I look out the window at the sky turning blue with the rising sun. Not enough time to sleep before I can go to the hospital and pick up my wife, so I take a walk through the park and force myself to remember the boy's face as it was before I started cutting. I hope that I'll feel the sickness I used to feel, when I started the practice. The sickness that made me put boundaries on when and how I used my powers. I search myself for any hint of guilt, but all I can feel is relief. I try to think of a way to explain her sudden health. How the pills she took were suddenly flushed from her system, and her wrists healed overnight. I can't think of anything, but it won't matter. I'll have my wife back. And she will never, ever leave.