Making his way through the Christ-haunted countryside, past the trees and into the deep darkness of the wilderness, the citizen evaded the law; the citizen was a man who wore overalls and boots, as he was a farmer, and the citizen once had a wife with whom he lived and quarreled; the citizen and his wife lived in a state of financial and emotional poverty, with the wife abusing the man when he was sober and the citizen abusing his wife when he got drunk; the two fought with such a frequency that they never had time to have children, nor did they have time to contemplate the impossibility of their relationship, aside from the fact that they couldn't split apart; then, one day, there was an altercation between the citizen and his wife to such a degree that violence erupted; the citizen killed his wife, in an act he would later claim to be an act of passion, or perhaps manslaughter in more legal terms (Why, he didn't [i]mean[/i] to kill her!), but this distinction did little to help him as he had, in fact, one way or the other, killed his wife; the citizen knew that the law would be after him, as he made no attempt to cover up his crime, nor did he try to deny it; everyone who knew about the incident knew the citizen had committed murder, intentionally or not; so the citizen, being like most men and not wanting to fall into the non-human jaws of the law, became a fugitive; indeed he left behind his life as a farmer who watched religiously over the crops as they grew and the cows as they produced milk, and, being quite the simple man, he did not take much with him as he went on the run, always on the move, always stuck with the impression that ghosts were following him, or more accurately the ever-changing but uncannily consistent eyes of the law; he had been on the run for what may have been decades, and in that time he witnessed the continuously morphing form of the law, how its agents wore different uniforms, yet possessed the same indifferent face; when the citizen started hiding from the law, he saw that they were men in dark grey uniforms, almost black, with their eyes as shadows and their disposition not so dissimilar from the citizen's own; then he saw that they sported armbands with symbols on them, and that these men now worked with attack dogs, the hounds with their teeth bared and their coats reeking of mud and something else unholy; then he saw that, at some point, the men themselves had been replaced as instruments of the law, replaced with autonomous robots who seemed different on the surface but emitted that same sense of apathetic loyalty to the will of the law; the citizen thought how strange it was that despite the change in agents, the law itself remained the same; the law (the citizen knew) was not a person, nor even a group of people, but a concept which could only be seen with one's own eyes through its myriad tendrils, the way in which it only ever revealed a minuscule fraction of itself, how it resembled a virus more than any known living thing; yes, the whole of the law was impossible to see all at once; it was so vast that no man could hope to understand its shadowy depths; even in moments of calm the citizen felt the phantasmal grip of the law around his throat, squeezing gently but always present, as if to remind the citizen of the battle he could not realistically win; the citizen had felt regret over what he had done to his wife for so long that he no longer knew when he first felt that pain of regret, that need for forgiveness, that need to be forgiven by [i]somebody[/i]; and, tragically, but truthfully most of all, the citizen realized he could not be forgiven, that the law was not conceived to be able to forgive anyone, and that the law would hunt him down eventually; the law had to win, of course, as it never slept, nor did it think about anything, and meanwhile the citizen begged for sleep and couldn't help but think about everything; so the citizen waited within the forest, in the dead of night, for the whole of the law to engulf him; there was nothing else he could do.