Lou

Lou was being reborn in anger, but, for now, the light was gone from his eyes.

His eyes were floating in their sockets nestled safely within his skull, but there was no life there. No hope. No dreams. No excitement.

No soul.

He couldn't pinpoint exactly when that light was extinguished, having only recently noticed his own bland gaze, but he knew it was gone. He felt it before he knew it, and he felt it quite some time ago.

As far as the anger goes, it was an anger bathed in acid and wrapped in excrement. A ferocious and brutal thing different than any he had experienced before.

This time it was dangerous.

Used to be, in more docile times, the anger would eat him up from the inside. Docility stemming from familiarity. Lou had been angry so long that it became a natural state. He used it to beat himself up, to smash mirrors, to despair of ever evolving to a higher plane of existence.

This anger, this newborn anger, was outward bound. So far he had punched a paper towel dispenser and a couple of innocent empty boxes. But he was beginning to think about faces and fractured cheekbones.

And change. Explosive no turning back now, baby, change.

This anger was fuel.

He was also thinking about time travel back to the 19th century. How delicious that would be. To spend some time in the company of opium, absinthe and laudanum. Languishing in his favorite opium den, drifting away in dreams of garish colors and unrestricted futures.

Maybe travel back only as far as the fifties and hook up with Kerouac and Cassady to romp around the North American continent. Let life happen to him for a while, devoid of rules and suffocating obligations. Take it as it comes, learn from it, be shaped by it and emerge all the better for it.

Lou was not sure he had time for any of that, assuming he could even get ahold of Emmett "Doc" Brown.

Enough time had been wasted.

For now, Lou contented himself with exploring the taste of this new anger. Rolling it over his tongue, bouncing it around his brain, feeling it seep into his cells.

Anticipating the eruption. The moment when the anger would highjack his soul and transform him into a fierce and formidable foe.

Life requires foes. Lou understood that now.

Those who did not fight back against life wound up under its boot heel.

Lou had enough footprints on his back.

He sat in the dark feeling the power within as it spread slowly throughout his essence.

He felt a calm peace as violence quietly took hold.

Lou felt the light returning to his eyes.  He smiled. A smile that spread slowly across his lips, so slowly that it looked grotesque until it eventually transformed his entire mouth.

A smile in the dark. A smile no one else would see.

For a while.