Once, there was a young man of no particular note. He lived an ordinary life, treading a quiet path just like any other. But one dawn, a thunderous knocking shattered his peace. When he opened the door, hands reached out from the gray light—unexplained and violent—dragging him into the mouth of a waiting cell.
He was cast into a dungeon to await the day of his execution.
Confused and desperate, he beat his fists against the stone, demanding to know his sin. At first, the guards ignored his pleas, believing his innocence was merely a performance. But his persistence became a fever. To silence his cries, they finally threw a heavy stack of documents into his cell.
The documents were monstrous. Hundreds of pages were dedicated to a single act, a crime so visceral and repulsive that the mere ink on the page seemed to bleed. Words like ghastly, egregious, and abhorrent leaped from the paper. It was a deed so dark that the young man could not read the description without his stomach turning in revulsion.
"This is not me," he whispered into the dark. "I have never known this evil."
But the world outside disagreed. Someone had been at the scene; someone had seen a silhouette. They had described a culprit who shared his every feature—every hair, every line of his face, every shadow of his gait. Thousands of "evidences" had been woven together until the lie was sturdier than the truth. The authorities had seen no need for an investigation; they were certain. To them, the case was as clear as the sun.
As the day of the noose drew near, the man begged for a fair trial, but his voice was met with a wall of silence. The people no longer looked at him as a human being. To them, he was a stain, a piece of dregs, a filth that contaminated the very air of society.
In the hollow of his despair, he began to wither. He stopped fighting the weight of their accusations. He looked at the immense disgust in their eyes and began to wonder if he was truly the monster they saw.
The day of his final fate arrived. As he walked toward the end, his heart remained a knot of confusion. With his final breaths, he did not pray; he cursed. He cursed the eyes of men.
He realized that though humans possess eyes to see and experience the beauty of the world, they use them instead as weapons of mindless judgment. They treat their own sight as an absolute truth, no matter how irrational or cruel that "truth" might be. They trust what they see, and they guard their witness with a pride that forbids them from ever admitting a mistake.
He was not a victim of a crime, nor a victim of the law. He was simply another soul devoured by the hunger of the eyes.