“Three Night’s in the Mirror” reflection: Each and every one of us are bloodthirsty monsters, don’t you agree?

*** Spoiler alert warning: If you have not yet read “Three Night’s in the Mirror”, you can find it on the “Piker’s Press” website. The following is my reflection on the story and may contain spoilers.

“Three Night’s in the Mirror” is the third short story I wrote, but it was the first to be published. That’s interesting to me. As I’ve written, I suppose I imagined that if anybody ever read the things I wrote it would be in the order in which I’d written them. But now I understand that that’s ridiculous, that it can’t possibly play out that way for a number of reasons. Regardless, “Three Nights in the Mirror” is my first published work of fiction, so I suppose it will always be a rather special story to me.

This was the first story I wrote where I sat down to write with confidence, where I’d felt I’d learned enough that I at least felt comfortable, where I wrote with intention and where I sat back and reread what I had written and felt rather satisfied with the finished product. So, in that regard, I suppose it makes perfect sense that it would be the first to be published, though chance had more to do with that than anything else.

But this is all boring behind the scenes stuff I suppose. Where did the story come from? I guess that’s why you’re here, if you’re still here. The answer to that question will probably always be the same: It didn’t come from just one place.

I do recall, however, waiting tables at Fox’s Pizza in Oak Lawn, IL. (best pizza in town if you ask me) when I came across a book another waiter had been reading in the back wait station. It was a non-fiction book about a hitman who worked for John Gotti. I only read the back cover but the person who had been reading it described to me in detail what the hitman claimed to have done to the neighbor who accidentally killed Gotti’s son in a car accident.

I won’t paint that picture for you, nor could I verify if it was true or not, but I still remember each detail of what had supposedly been done to the poor man out on a boat floating around shark-infested waters. I didn’t like hearing about it, and that’s what surprised me because I was a horror guy, right? I suppose real life horror was too much for me, truth was stranger than fiction, that sort of thing. Supernatural horror doesn’t generally bother me because it isn’t real, it’s far away, it’s a spooky idea that I can walk away from whenever I want. But true crime sometimes does bother me, because it exists in the real world where those kinds of bad guys can actually be standing outside your window peering in at you, planning on making you their next victim (sweet dreams tonight…). The terrible things we do to each other as human beings will always frighten me more than any thoughts of ghosts, goblins, vampires and werewolves, etc.

Much of the story comes from that memory I have, though my story is rated PG compared to the details embedded in the hitman’s confession. In a different way though, the story goes a step further than just depicting a hitman paying for his sins, at least I hope it does. I think it’s actually a story about how a thirst for revenge lives inside each of us to varying degrees. Consider, for example, how easy and natural it is to feel bad for the victim of a crime. It’s natural (I hope) to feel bad for someone who suffered, whether they deserved to or not. And yet, don’t we quickly reject such feelings when it comes to the criminal? We certainly don’t feel bad for them, right? Should we feel bad for them? Could we? Does justice ever go too far? Become too cruel? I don’t know, and I’m not trying to get too preachy about it, at least not yet, but it was something I wanted to explore in writing the story.

I mean, don’t we often cheer when the bad guy gets what’s coming to them? Don’t we enjoy a sigh of relief when justice is served, even if the justice came with suffering? I think we do, even the best of us. And what does that say about us, about our subconscious bloodlust that we feed from time to time? I mean, let’s put the puzzle together and stare down at it for a moment. Apparently, what most of us like seems to be for a bad guy to do terrible things while we watch because we find that interesting/exciting, then sit back and hope and wish and pray for retribution against that bad guy.

It’s more than even that though, I suppose. Certainly, to get back to my short story, not every criminal pays the price for their actions, not every hitman gets cursed by an angry old woman. There’s an element of bad luck in the story, a bit of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” except that the victim is far from innocent. Regardless, the ending is intended to make the reader decide if it’s a happy, celebratory ending because justice was served, or a sad, tragic ending because someone else died. Either argument can be made. Most readers won’t stop to think much about it at all, which is understandable, but people probably feel one way or the other by the end of the story. And that was my goal in writing the story and its ending, to get readers to consider how we, as observers, feel about eye for an eye “justice”. Let’s not even get started on when the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Although it probably did in this story, that’s not always the case.

I suppose it doesn’t take all that much philosophical digging to realize that each and every one of us are bloodthirsty monsters, don’t you agree? Sure, we prefer to read about it in a book, to watch that true crime documentary from the comfort of our couch, to be standing safely outside the fence as we point, laugh, clap and smile while that greedy bastard lawyer from the original Jurassic Park gets eaten alive by a Tyrannosaurus Rex because he totally deserved that, right?

Right?