c. Murders his neighbor’s entire family with the scissors

Those scissors are inescapable. It’s as if they’re attached to the man’s hands, appendages extending appendages. The madness of a dull life has finally made its mark, tearing into his sanity like a metaphorical knife, carving away like a metaphorical pair of scissors. Much like the very scissors in his possession. What to do with them? What else is there to do but cut? Cut like an insane unhinged madman. No more constraints, no more delusions of morality. Just madness, pure unadulterated madness. Let it bleed, man.

INT. NICE NEIGHBOR’S HOME – DAY

The man takes advice from deep within his id, which only follows a constitution of aimless violence. He takes his scissors, his most sufficient weapon of unconscious Freudian rage, and walks across the side yard to his neighbor’s house, opening the curiously unlocked back door. He steps inside, expecting to find his neighbor’s family there, but there is only the one neighbor, sitting in his living room, watching TV. Some weird show called Meet the Losers of Horrible America. How fitting, the man likely thinks. How great that this is what is lingering in the world: a man whose only existence relies on watching shitty people in a shitty country do shitty things.

He creeps into the family room and walks up to him, scissors ready for action, held wide open. The neighbor turns around, hearing a solitary creak in the floorboards, which are 1,000 years old.

NEIGHBOR
What are you doing? Did you want to watch
Meet the Losers of Horrible America with me?

MAN
No. I came to kill you with these scissors.

NEIGHBOR
Oh. Is there anything that can convince you not to?

MAN
No.

NEIGHBOR
Very well then. Do what you’ve got to, I suppose.

The man walks forward, holding the scissors farther out, but winds up fixated with the image of one of the “losers” on TV. He stares at the screen for a moment, watching thoughtfully as a man who weighs 965 pounds walks at the speed of a sloth across the street, his voiceover talking about how it takes him ten hours to walk from work to home every day as cars coldly honk at the man. The car winds up finally driving around the poor guy after waiting an hour, and the man sits beside his neighbor after watching it happen. He realizes that his job at the oatmeal factory is nothing compared to the horrid torment the fat lump on the screen faces. And yet, in comparison, the man’s own life is much more inconsequential than that man’s; at least the one on the screen gets attention, can inspire those to improve America’s conditions, while the man’s life is nothing but a metaphor for the banality of anomalous existence. Why live any longer in this droll life? Why not just end it?

MAN
America really is terrible.

NEIGHBOR
Yep. It sure is a place for the wild to wander and die.

The neighbor turns to the man.

NEIGHBOR
Would you like a sandwich?

MAN
No. I’d like to die.

The man then proceeds to stab himself in the face with his scissors, until he’s no longer able to do it. He bleeds on the couch and promises his neighbor that it’ll be seen as a suicide as long as the guy leaves no fingerprints on the scissors. The man then dies. Day Five won’t happen.

END

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