Nobody knew why he did it that afternoon. They all said he went crazy. 

John wandered around the streets after his seventh interview. His hair was messy after the nap on the train, and there was a random stain on his shirt - probably from the ramen he just rushed to eat earlier. He kept thinking of how the manager was staring at a spot below his neck, and he just figured out that it was the stain that distracted her from the interview, or maybe it was the wrinkles he did not have time to iron out? He wasn’t sure, but all he knew was that something was wrong about him, or the system. Before coming to this city, John would never call himself cynical, and he solely believed that anyone could have the chance to succeed as long as they tried. Shanghai was a city of chance, a city where dreams come true. But he figured that would only happen under certain conditions: either born rich, with a Shanghai residence, or became lucky enough to win a lottery worth a million dollars. He fit into neither of these conditions. He wandered aimlessly, thinking. 

It was half past four. It has been a month since John first stepped out of the train station, and every day of the month he would sit on the balcony of the tiny apartment he rented, eating lunch and watching kids cheerfully walk out and greet their parents with joy. He would watch them get into those fancy cars he had only seen on the television. He had no one, if the creaking fan and the poorly looking bed did not count. Usually the clamor of kids made him smile a bit - it lessened his stress after doing nothing in the city. At least there is hope, he would think, hope that they will grow up and change the system. But this specific day after the consistent failure in life, he felt a sudden rage, an emotion so strong that he could not suppress it. He looked at the kids hopping and skipping all the way with joy, but all he saw was the opportunities he could’ve gained without their privileges. 

John did not know how he grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen, or how he wandered downstairs and walked out of the neighborhood with nobody stopping him. He had absolutely no clue how he followed two boys into a narrow alley and did not get spotted. The next moment he knew, they were lying in a pool of blood.

It was like hell. 

Everything happened so quickly, and the scene was so bloody that anyone who saw it was too stunned to say anything, or do anything to stop him. After a few minutes, people started screaming, crying, running away from the alley.

John did not have the chance to look at the kid carefully until then, who had fine, delicate features: his skin was fair and smooth, and his hair trimmed and styled nicely even though he probably messed it up earlier when he was hanging out with friends. John tried to find any traits that resembled his childhood, but there was nothing about a poor, slovenly dropped out kid from the countryside that would ever be able to compare to the kid lying on the ground right now. After the sudden rage, he was drowned in helplessness. The alley was soon filled with crowds, the witnesses who saw the murder and the masses who was attracted by the chaos. The walls were covered in blood, fresh, still dripping, one of the juveniles’. 

He stood there, unarmed, head down. For someone who just arrived at the scene, if it wasn’t the blood all over his body, he would seem too innocent, or scared, to commit the crime. The knife was somehow dropped on the ground. The blade was split from the amount of strength he put in. 

People swarmed around him, and soon he disappeared in the crowd. When the crowd dispersed, he was kneeling on the ground, hands and feet tied with some form of strings, like a prey in a last-ditch struggle.

That night, the alley was lit by hundreds and thousands of candles, one next to another. People came to mourn for the loss of such young lives and to express their hatred toward the murderer. Nobody remembered his name, and nobody dared to care what happened to him in jail. After all, he was just one of the million John’s in the city.