The girl was slim and long of body, with willowy light brown hair. She walked with the loose-limbed grace of youth, and the satisfaction of being alive. She was not pretty, with small, pale eyes, a long prominent nose, and thin mouth, but her features were clean and wholesome and oddly aristocratic. Her face radiated kindness and honesty. She was the kind of girl you'd want as a best friend, the kind of girl men might not fall in love with right away but would feel drawn to. Samuel knew, down deep, that such a girl could never want him… And he longed for her, for her carefree body that moved so freely and easily-her aliveness and unself-conscious enjoyment of physical existence. He tried to imagine feeling that way, but if he ever had, he couldn't remember it.
He watched her sitting on the park bench for quite a while, until she stood up and stretched, arching her back and throwing her head back, exposing her throat. It was the sight of their exposed throats that excited him the most: moist, white, supple, arched in passion. The naked curves of this bare flesh were more alluring to him than breasts, erect nipples, or tender thighs. The sight of a woman's bare throat made his eyes glaze over and his heart quicken in its bony cage, as if it wanted to burst out of his body.
After she had left the bench, he went over and sat on the spot where she had sat, warming the green-painted wood with her soft bottom. Samuel could smell faint traces of her shampoo-lily of the valley. He knew his floral scents-his mother had taught him well. He thought of his mother, digging in the dirt, her back to him, her bottom in the air, waving it at him, taunting him.
He felt the anger inside him, a tiny nugget of hardened rage, smoldered and condensed, shrunken like a piece of anthracite fired to its most hardened form. It hovered there at the core of him, shiny and black and smooth, nestled at the very center of his being. There was a time when it had hurt him, when its sharp and unpolished edges tore at his soul, chafing him no matter which way he turned-but he had nurtured it, until eventually it became his constant friend and companion. He turned it this way and that, gazing upon its shiny surface, noticing with admiration how it seemed to absorb all the light around it, drawing him down into its darkened depths.
Gradually he had come to accept his rage not as an enemy, but as a friend. It had things to teach him, and he was determined to listen. He learned to love its hard, unforgiving surface and dark beauty. The outside world would always be a bewildering, disappointing place, but he could draw into himself and know that his rage would be there waiting for him, an unpolished gemstone in the dark center of his soul.
Underneath the park bench, a fly struggled in a spider-web. He smiled as he watched the spider approach its struggling prey, all nicely wrapped in the deadly grip of the spider's web. In eating the fly, the spider was simply doing its job. Just as he, in his late-night missions, was doing his job. A spider, he knew, can feel the tiniest vibration on its web-a signal that another meal has landed. Then, carefully, the spider will approach to inject venom in its hapless victim. He too felt a vibration on his web, and he was going to do what he could to trap his victim.