He was omnipotent. It doesn't matter how he became omnipotent; he just did. 'Why?' is similarly irrelevant. Sometimes things just happen. Deal with it.

It happened shortly after his Decree Absolute came in. The divorce seemed to have been going on most of his life, and he knew he should feel relieved it was finally over. He wasn't.

He used the power for trivial, obvious things at first: money, possessions, sex.

He decided the scores of football matches and placed bets accordingly, before it occurred to him that he could just will the money into his account or wallet and cut out the middle-man. He later realised that money was a technicality when you could create anything you wanted from nothing; anything you could imagine.

He bedded several women from work, a few of his friend's girlfriends, moving on to porn stars and celebrities, sometimes combining all of the above.

He assumed the highest-salaried job in his company, only to resign immediately.

He was able to make himself look the way he'd always wanted to, and de-aged himself by a number of years.

He fashioned his perfect home, which he changed according to his whims. He accumulated countless cars, despite the fact that he could be wherever he wanted to be simply by wanting to be there.

He got bored.

He started doing spiteful little things to those who'd wronged him in the past.

Two women who'd been in his class at high school and who'd, incidentally, spurned his awkward, adolescent advances, found their silicone breast implants doing strange and unsightly things.

A neighbour who'd inconsiderately mowed his lawn at 8:00a.m. every Sunday in the summer electrocuted himself - not fatally, but amusingly - by running the offending lawnmower over its own power cable.

He ensured that a former work colleague whom he'd never liked was embroiled in a blistering scandal involving two deliverymen, a toilet brush, a jar of sheep liniment and a lot of uncut cocaine.

To his ex-brother-in-law, professionally successful and hugely dislikeable, he gave testicular cancer.

He visited misfortune upon his ex-wife and the good-looking, charismatic civil engineer for whom she'd left him. He rendered the man impotent and made his hair fall out. The spacious detached property they shared was struck by lightning, and - it thrilled him to hear - the insurers wouldn't pay out, deeming the occurrence an Act of God.

He made his ex-wife get drunk at a party, and have sex with a trendy magazine journalist, almost young enough to be her son. He made sure that her lover arrived on the scene in time to catch her in the act. Inadequate and devastated, the now-balding civil engineer booked into a Travelodge and, using his Pierre Cardin tie as the noose, hanged himself from the hook on the back of the door.

That was, admittedly, further than he'd counted on things going, and feeling somewhat guilty, he undid the damage he'd wrought on the couple's lives. Although his conscience was appeased, he felt cheated out of the revenge to which he was entitled.

And that was when it came to him: if he could undo anything he'd done, then surely he could never be guilty of anything. If any wrong he committed he could right again, then right and wrong had no meaning.

With this in mind, he decided to kill the civil engineer. He waited one night, lead pipe tucked discreetly inside his coat, for him to emerge from his office, and followed him to his car. In the dim, yellow-lit multi-storey, he stoved the man's head in. He put up a fight, but chances of victory are slim against an omnipotent opponent.

Before the blood had finished pooling on the cold grey floor - gloss-black under the dim yet harsh lighting - he rewound time, until he was once again on the street corner outside the office building, watching the man who now shared his former wife's life leaving work and vanishing into the evening gloom.

There. He'd done nothing wrong.

How many more times, in how many different ways, did he kill him? It may have run to hundreds. It may have been more. Sometimes it was quick and savage, like the incident in the car park, sometimes slow and meticulous, following intricate plans and utilising ingenious props, but every time, he undid his actions. His victim would be resurrected, without the vaguest idea that he'd been reduced, albeit briefly, to so much blood, bone and tissue.

All's well that ends well. So long as he didn't leave anybody dead, he wasn't a murderer, no matter how many times he killed.

Everything was within his reach. He commanded life and death. There was nothing he couldn't do or have.

He became quite mad.

With everything attainable, nothing meant anything. None of it was real.

He tried suicide a few times, but his attempts proved unsuccessful when in that split-second before death he wished he wasn't about to die, and instinctively revived himself.

He wasn't sure when he lost control of it, when his fractured mind started leaking power.

He sat in his cavernous lounge, alone with his splintered thoughts. His subconscious was doing things again. Next to him, a sofa evolved jointed legs and wandered away. The table burst into an array of petals made of meat and razor-blades.

He could have cured cancer, eradicated AIDS, ended conflict. Never mind. People would've just found another way to fuck things up.

He could have had his wife back. But it wouldn't have been real.

The distant wall resolved into the shape of his grandmother's face and then melted.

He didn't want to live any more, but he couldn't die.

He smiled. He'd thought of something.





41 years earlier. This time around.

Warm, wet redness trickled onto white porcelain; blood, chunks of womb lining sinking through water to settle on the bottom of the toilet. Better late than never. It wasn't like they could afford a child now anyway

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