Written for Reedsy Prompt #348, “What Makes Us Human?”, this psychological short story was my exercise in exploring fear, dread, and emotional tension through transcript alone. 

When I first saw the prompt, I was immediately drawn to the idea of a character questioning his own humanity. While the psychology behind that question interested me, I wanted to challenge myself in the way I might tell it. I did not want to rely on the usual tools of scene-building. I wanted to strip everything back and see whether I could still create fear, tension, and emotional weight using almost nothing but voice.

That is why I chose the transcript format.

From the start, I wanted this story to feel cold on the surface but increasingly unsettling underneath. A transcript can look factual, almost detached, and I liked the idea of using that distance to create discomfort. Instead of describing expressions, movements, or a room in detail, I had to think much more carefully about pauses, interruptions, word choice, repetition, and what each character avoided saying. That became this piece's real challenge.

For me, this story was as much about craft as it was about plot. I wanted to practice expressing fear without leaning on the usual visual description. I wanted to see if calm could become threatening through rhythm and tone. I also wanted to explore whether longing, grief, denial, and terror could still be felt when the reader has only a conversation transcript to guide them. This story became an experiment in restraint: saying less, but trying to make each line carry more.

It also pushed me to think more deeply about voice. The subject needed to sound controlled, precise, and intelligent without becoming theatrical, while Eliot had to shift gradually from professional detachment to visible fear.

This piece is part of my writing journey. I want to keep testing different forms, different emotional registers, and different ways of creating atmosphere. Sometimes that means practicing a specific skill and seeing what it teaches me. This one taught me a great deal about subtext, control, and how much emotion silence can carry.

So while this story began as a response to a Reedsy prompt, it also became something more personal: a way to push my craft, experiment with form, and learn how to make tension live on the page even when almost everything has been stripped away.

Here is the story. I hope the result works.

The following transcript was recovered from a digital camera found in the apartment of documentary filmmaker Eliot Vanog, reported missing on October 14.

The identity of the interview subject remains unknown.

INTERVIEWER (ELIOT VANOG): Why did you reach out to me specifically?

SUBJECT: Fourteen months ago, at your conference in Chicago on the human capacity for violence, you said something.

INTERVIEWER: What did I say?

SUBJECT: You said, “The word monster is a moral shortcut. It lets us pretend brutality is something inhuman, when in fact it is one of the most human things there is.”

[Pause]

INTERVIEWER: You remembered that exactly.

SUBJECT: I remember most things exactly.

INTERVIEWER: What was it about that sentence that unsettled you?

SUBJECT: Unsettled is an interesting word. But no. I don’t think that’s quite right. What disturbed me was not that you were calling me monstrous, but that you were suggesting I might not be.

[Long pause]

SUBJECT: The first time someone called me a monster, I was eight. A car hit a cat on my way home from school. It was still moving. One of its back legs was mangled. The sound was unpleasant.

[Silence]

SUBJECT: I picked up a rock. It was the right size. I used it. The sound was different from the car.

[Pause]

SUBJECT: And the other children screamed.

INTERVIEWER: They called you a monster?

SUBJECT: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: How did you feel?

[Silence]

SUBJECT: Confused. I went home confused.

INTERVIEWER: Because of their reaction?

SUBJECT: The rock felt right in my hand.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean, it felt right?

SUBJECT: The weight. The movement. The sound. Everything felt right.

[Pause]

INTERVIEWER: You—you’re describing a kind of satisfaction.

SUBJECT: Satisfaction isn’t quite the word I’d use. It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t pleasure. It was… rightness. Like putting the final piece in a puzzle. The noise stopped, the movement stopped, and everything went quiet. Then the other children started crying. So I went home.

INTERVIEWER: You just—went home?

SUBJECT: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: And what happened when you got home?

SUBJECT: I asked my father.

INTERVIEWER: What did you ask him?

SUBJECT: I explained what happened. The cat. The rock. The children. And asked him if I was a monster.

[Pause]

INTERVIEWER: And what did he say?

SUBJECT: He knelt down and put his hands on my shoulders. He told me that I was not a monster. That it took courage to end suffering like that. He said I must have a very big heart.

[Silence]

INTERVIEWER: That’s—I mean, that’s a reasonable interpretation. A child ending an animal’s suffering. That’s not an unreasonable thing for a father to—

SUBJECT: No. It isn’t.

INTERVIEWER: So he was right? What you experienced—that sense of rightness—it was empathy. Expressed differently than most children would express it, but—

SUBJECT: You’re doing the same now.

INTERVIEWER: Doing what?

SUBJECT: What my father did. What people always do when they don’t want to see the truth.

INTERVIEWER: I’m not—I’m trying to understand what you’re telling me.

SUBJECT: I let him believe it. The mercy explanation. I let him hold my shoulders and look at me with that relief in his eyes, and I nodded. I told him I just didn’t want the cat to hurt anymore. I watched his face relax, and I understood something.

INTERVIEWER: What did you understand?

SUBJECT: That I was different. But I could pass. I could pretend, say the right things, act the way they expected. But I knew what I was. I knew the truth, even if they didn’t.

INTERVIEWER: And what is the truth?

SUBJECT: That I enjoyed it. Not the mercy. Not the ending of pain. I enjoyed the weight of the rock and the sound it made, and the way everything stopped because I chose it to stop.

[Pause]

INTERVIEWER: And what came after?

SUBJECT: More animals. For a time. Until they weren’t sufficient.

[Long pause]

INTERVIEWER: When you say insufficient—

SUBJECT: I mean exactly what I said.

INTERVIEWER: So what? You escalated?

SUBJECT: That word implies desperation. A junkie chasing a dose. No. It was more like a craftsman recognizing the limits of his current tools.

INTERVIEWER: How—how many people?

SUBJECT: That isn’t the interesting question.

INTERVIEWER: It seems fairly interesting to me.

SUBJECT: No, I didn’t come here for this.

INTERVIEWER: So what did you come here for?

SUBJECT: I told you. I want to know.

INTERVIEWER: Know what?

SUBJECT: Patience. We are not here yet.

[Silence]

SUBJECT: The first person was a woman named Carla. Names are important. People think the ones who do this sort of thing rarely bother with names. I always bothered.

[Brief pause]

SUBJECT: She delivered pharmaceutical samples to the clinic. Very efficient. Always on time. She smelled like a forest after the rain.

INTERVIEWER: You—you remember the smell.

SUBJECT: I remember everything about her. The way she held her clipboard against her chest like a shield. The small rose at her collarbone. The way she smiled at me. She was genuine.

INTERVIEWER: Then why?

SUBJECT: Because I wanted to.

[Pause]

SUBJECT: And it’s been like this for years. Until I heard you.

INTERVIEWER: In Chicago?

SUBJECT: Your words made me think of someone. A man. He was blind from birth. Completely. He had no conception of color, no memory of light. He knew my footsteps. He would turn toward me before I reached him.

[Pause]

SUBJECT: I stayed with him. At the end. He was very calm. He said he wasn’t afraid. He wanted to hold my hand, and I let him.

[Long silence]

SUBJECT: When it was over, I sat with him for some time. I don’t know how long. And I felt something I hadn’t felt before and hadn’t felt since. An absence. Like a room you’ve grown used to that is suddenly empty of furniture.

[Silence]

INTERVIEWER: That feeling. The absence. That’s—you’re describing grief.

SUBJECT: Is it?

INTERVIEWER: The description is consistent with—

SUBJECT: I’m not asking you to diagnose it.

[Sound of a fist hitting the table]

INTERVIEWER: Please—there’s no need for that. I… I’m just trying to understand.

SUBJECT: I always knew that I was different. You call people like me monsters, sociopaths, less than human. I call it superiority. Freedom.

[Sound of a loud exhale]

SUBJECT: I did cruel things because I wanted to. Because they felt right.

[Silence]

SUBJECT: And for most of my life, I thought that meant I was something other than human. That what I felt with the blind man was an exception. An error. A moment of—

[Short pause]

SUBJECT:—I don’t know. Something I wasn’t supposed to feel.

[Pause]

SUBJECT: I need to know if you truly believe what you said. That I am not a monster. That I am simply human.

INTERVIEWER: I believe that. I stand by what I said.

SUBJECT: No, I want to know if you still believe it now. Sitting here. With me.

INTERVIEWER: I—

SUBJECT: Don’t answer yet.

[Sound of a chair moving]

SUBJECT: There is only one way to know what I am. You understand that.

INTERVIEWER: What are you—

SUBJECT: To know whether I am human or a monster, you have to meet the part of me people fear.

[Sound of footsteps moving toward the camera]

INTERVIEWER: Wait. Wait, please—

SUBJECT: I’m not going to ask you to be calm. You won’t be. That would be dishonest of both of us.

[The sound of something being set down]

INTERVIEWER: [Barely audible] Please.

SUBJECT: I did not come here to be understood by you. I came here because I needed to understand something about myself.

INTERVIEWER: I have a—I have a daughter. She’s—

SUBJECT: I know.

[Silence]

SUBJECT: And you—do you see me as human?

[Recording cuts out]