I don't think I'm ever going to be happy. Seriously. I'd tried so hard for so long to live a fulfilling and exceptional life but it had only brought me to where I was today. Sitting by lamplight at the desk of my bedroom, with my face in my hands and a terrible headache.

If you were friends with me and talked to me often, you probably wouldn't be able to tell that anything was wrong with me. I do a good job of maintaining a good looking stature, my behavior is typically good and I am usually someone that people view as enjoyable to be around. And even I believe that I'm a fun person to be around, I don't have any doubts about that. In fact sometimes I think that I would be my own best friend, if I was a different person.

So why was I sitting there, doing nothing at my desk? I was trying to cry, or just pull some sort of act of emotion from my body one time, just to get all of this misery out of me before I would continue with what I was about to do. But it wouldn't happen, even if I closed my eyes and pushed the eyelids together as strongly as I could, nothing would do anything.

Eventually it had gotten pointless. I sat up and looked to my ceiling, and watched the fan as it spun above me. There was nothing I could do to make me feel better about myself, I was going to have to accept that I was a miserable fool. I started to feel my palms sweat and my legs twitch.

Ever since I was a child, I've been, for the most part, a fraud. Even though I'd put no effort forth to achieve any of the things I have, they all came to me as if it was only natural. Growing up in school, it seemed as if no one could compare to me. That's exactly what had taken me here today, why I was having some sort of existential crisis in the middle of the night.

Today, in my job and in my personal life, all I could see were people that were jealous or envious of me. I didn't understand what I had done that made me like that, it seemed to me like it was obvious that I was a fraud. No one like me could ever be so outwardly enthusiastic and interesting. People should have been able to tell.

I don't know. It's probably best that I get to my story and talk about what I was about to do. It took a while, but I was able to convince myself to stand to my feet and walk to my bed. There was something I needed under it. I got the shoebox from under the bed and took it to the desk, and then I sat for a while and breathed deeply again. I didn't want to have a panic attack right now.

So the shoebox obviously contained something of importance, right? Well, my whole life I've had to hide an extraordinary power from everyone, including my parents and the people closest to me, to avoid attention being drawn to me. When I was just four or five I discovered that I could shrink anything if I put my mind to it, and concentrated. It started out really hard to perform, and it wasn't worth all the time I would spend trying to do it, but when I reached puberty it slowly became easier and easier. Now I was here today.

The point of the story is, I had abused my power for the first time in my life. In some fit of selfishness, I shrank a living, breathing person who had bumped into me on the street and insulted me. When it happened, I was terrified, and I looked everywhere to make sure no one had saw, and to my surprise, it looked they hadn't. The person was too disoriented to move around or try to run, so I picked them up and put them in my purse and continued with my day.

That's how I got the first person. I kept them with me like a pet and tried to make their life easy, but it was too hard. You see, the vice to this power I have is that I cannot grow things after they've been shrunken. It makes the power mostly useless, so I've never used it for anything outside of random outbursts where I would shrink things just to feel good.

It was too hard, and eventually, I couldn't live with myself anymore. I didn't want to kill them, so I tried to set them free. I just left them at my doorstep and told them to be good. And I just went back into my apartment, like nothing had happened.

But the next day when I walked out, they were standing by my door, ready to beg to be let back in. There was a moment of fear in me, fear that I couldn't just let things continue as if I didn't do anything, but my first reaction was to say, "Stupid bugs," and step on him, as if he was nothing. And so I had taken a life, but I had to keep on living.

At first I didn't feel bad about anything, but as the days dragged on, I felt worse and worse, and soon I came to where I was now. Sitting in my room in the middle of the nights, trying to cry but being unable to. It was during one of these bouts that I came to a conclusion.

What I was trying so hard to accept was that deep down, I had enjoyed what I did. It was fun, and I wanted to do it again. Not the raising part, I wanted to kill someone, after they'd been shrunken. That was the first time I managed to convince myself to cry.

Over the course of about a month, I managed to shrink five people in secret. Each time I moved them to the shoebox under my bed, and I had been feeding them and keeping them okay for when the night that I finally went through with it came. I picked five because it felt like a good, round number to start with. I planned to shrink more people after this first amount.

I think that you're understanding me now. Let's get to the point, I opened the shoebox and was met with the five people. Four of them were asleep, and the fifth seemed to be too distracted with something to notice that I was now looking down at them. I decided that he was the best person to start with.

As gently as I could, I picked him up out of the box and took him to the surface of my desk. He was about an inch tall now. He had brown hair and a pretty slim stature, but I didn't find anything about him to be attractive. I guess it was easier to shrink ugly people than normal or attractive ones.

He looked up to me and started shouting, but at his size I would only hear him if I brought him close to my ear. And I didn't really care about doing that, I just wanted to get this over with.

In my mind I already had planned what I was going to do with all five people, and the first one would work as a sort of test run. I wanted to figure out the limits of these small peoples bodies, so I knew how much I could abuse the other four later. My first action was pretty simple.

I picked him back up after examining his body, and took one of his arms between my fingers. First I tugged gently, but soon I began to pull roughly. Even though he was small, I could at least hear his screams, incredibly quiet as they were. When his arm came loose from the joint and ripped off, he went silent.

The arm was interesting to look at, when it was disembodied like that. I took it between my fingers and bent at the elbow joint for a while, until it came apart and the arm was separated into two parts. I went back to the guy.

He seemed to be close to passing out, so I had to make the rest of this process quick and simple. I took a safety pin from my drawer and took the sharp end out of the protective area, and brought it to him. I didn't know if he knew about it or not, as he had started yelling again, so it wasn't clear if he was yelling about his arm or the pin. I didn't really care.

I placed the pin on the right side of his body, over his rib cage, and began to drive it through him. The ribs were of little resistance, and eventually I had fully put it through his body, then with a tiny push, it exited out of his other side. I wasn't trying to kill him, but as his struggling stopped and he went limp, it seemed like I did. I had probably poked too close to the heart.

When I removed the pin and set him down, blood began to pour out of the two holes, as well pieces of the organs I had minced with the force of the pin. There was even some gurgling within his mouth.

Although he was dead, I wasn't done testing yet. I did the same test I had done with the arm on his leg, which came off just as easily. When I was done with that, I placed my thumb over his head on the desk, and pushed down. The skull was surprisingly difficult to rupture, but when I did, it provided a satisfying pop. His brains came from a hole at the top of his head, splattering across my desk for a distance of several inches.

When I looked at his mutilated body, I felt a lot better. The result of my pressure on his head was very interesting, it seemed as though it had become completely unrecognizable, there was nothing about the head that resembled what it had once been. Even his eyes seemed to have popped under my thumb, becoming sagging blobs within the shallow remains of his orbits.

I walked to the table next to my bed and took a box of tissues from it back to my desk. I used one to wipe his body off of the table, and it took another to clean all of his blood and brain matter. I tossed them into the small trash can next to me. My nose was stuffed a bit from the weather so I blew it into another tissue.

The box was still open next to me. The lamplight had clearly awoken all four of the rest, and they were sitting around in a circle, talking to each other. When they noticed, they all looked up at me, and one of the girls began to try shouting at me. I wanted to be honest, so I said to her, "I can't hear you, you're too small. I just got done experimenting with your first friend, and I'm going to use you next. Come here."

She backed away and tried to run to the corner of the box, but I got my finger under her and scooped her into my hand. I squinted, looking down at her. I had always wondered what a person would taste like.