bullies raze he and his friend were a few years older than me. i was nine or ten. we shared the same bus and the same bus stop. in the morning they would call me a faggot like it was somehow an evil thing to be gay, even though it wasn't and i wasn't. after school they would talk about how they were going to break into the house that night and kill my entire family. "we'll slit their throats while you're sleeping," they told me, smiling the way you'd smile about going to the school dance with a pretty girl. the joke was on them. what they thought was my house belonged to my stepfather's mother. i didn't live there. i didn't sleep there. and they would have been doing me a favour by killing those people. that wasn't my real family. that was the family i inherited from the human skid mark the woman whose body vomited me into the world took for a second husband. they were all far worse bullies than those two kids were. they never beat me up, the kids who were going to kill my fake family any night now. they never scared me. not really. but they never left me alone either, until the kid who did most of the talking fell off his bike, scraped his knee, and contracted a flesh-eating bacteria that made a meal of his body and killed him in an awful way. i read about it in the newspaper and wasn't sure what i was supposed to feel. he was a horrible kid. he bullied a lot of other kids. some of them weren't as unaffected as i was. when he died they put a picture of him smiling in the front of the yearbook, and everyone talked about what a wonderful young man he was. they made an award in his honour, to give to the student who most embodied his traits of kindness and compassion — things he never showed any of us, if he even possessed them or knew what they were. someone who spends his school days telling smaller, weaker children about what fags they are and how he's going to murder their families just for kicks doesn't deserve an award named after him. i don't care how tragic his death is. don't get me wrong. what happened to him, i wouldn't wish on anyone. but when his mother came to talk to the school about how amazing he was and wiped away tears, i looked at my best friend and said, "this feels wrong. i know we're supposed to be sad, but i'm not. i don't know who she's talking about. he wasn't a good person to me. i'm not sorry he's gone." i remember seeing his friend walking around looking lost. i don't think he bullied anyone after that. not even as a tribute to his fallen comrade. he just kind of faded away. i didn't think about either one of them much after that, until last night, more than twenty years after all that, when i had a dream the one who died never died at all. i was living in an apartment building. he was another tenant. everyone was terrified of him. as a man he was a hundred times the bully he was as a kid. he was supernatural. you heard whispering in the halls when he was coming. there was no one there to whisper. this was the warning the place gave you, and you knew it was time to run as fast as you could, duck into your apartment, and lock the door, for all the good it would do. doors wouldn't keep him out. he'd get in wherever he wanted, whenever he felt like it. he stole. he murdered innocent people. he killed a kind older woman who was my friend just because he could. no one would stand up to him. no one tried to stop him. i felt weak and small whenever he was around. it took him stealing my money — tens of thousands of dollars i'd saved — and writing new labels on all my old vhs tapes to get me to snap. i ate some candies that were emboldening drugs from a small black duffel bag, and then i killed him and all his cronies with a rust-coloured baseball bat. they had heads of stone, of steel, of something unbreakable. i broke them anyway. every last one of them. i fucking ended them. after waking up and having a bit of time to process that, i thought it was strange that i was far more afraid of him in the dream than i ever was in life, and strange that it felt so good to kill him. i guess you never really forget a bully or how they made you feel, even if fear wasn't a part of the unwanted gift they gave you. 151006 what's it to you? who go blather from