This gave me the jitters, I love it. Dave’s sitting next to a psychopath!
LoA

I wish it was something less having to do with stigmatizing a certain sort of mental illness and, say, something supernatural…

I read an article about psychopaths the other day (this one: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=936) and this sentence in it struck a chord with me and I’ve been percolating on it ever since:

Some psychologists go so far as to label the psychopath “a different kind of humanâ€? altogether.

So yeah, That’s how this ficlet came about.

Er, to address White Hat, it wasn’t my intent to stigmatize a mental illness. I was just thinking about what it would be like if psychopaths really were a different kind of human and they coexisted with “regular” humans. Obviously in the ficlet format, there isn’t enough room to expand on the thought in one entry but in my head, there are good and bad psychopaths. This guy in the story could be a bad one and maybe David’s talent is telling the good from the bad. Who knows.

Makes sense.