Every Effect Contains Its Cause

A sixteen-year-old boy stood beneath his neighbor's pear tree, fruit juice sticky on his fingers. He had no hunger. No need. Just the intoxicating pull of rebellion coursing through his veins.

He and his friends stripped the tree bare. They weren’t interested in eating, they threw most of the fruit to the pigs. The act itself was everything. The sweet taste of transgression. The thrill of taking what wasn't theirs.

"I loved my own undoing," he would later confess. "I loved the evil in me. Not the thing for which I did evil, but the evil itself."