He is
aware of this dream and here upon its repeat is terrified, impotent in the
foreknowledge of what must be witnessed.
Something:
She has been paid to fulfil a contract on
his life, concluding with them both upon their knees, facing each the other. Thick
in her hand the revolver unused, she hesitates to murder, and they talk. There
is neither pleading nor hysteria, rather measured and solemn tones of
conversation. They compromise to this, that he will first shoot her, then turn
the weapon now passing hands upon himself.
Lifting the gun, he presses its
snubby barrel so tight to her forehead as to disturb the brow-skin into tense
folds. Her head starts to spasm. He drops his eyes.
The sound deafens.
There is something awful up in his
periphery that he will not regard, and the smell.
He seems to feel a red vapour
condense and settle, thickening his eyelashes.
With his gaze still lowered, the
gun now floats itself, the metal at his temple neither hot not cold.
The second retort is muted within
the still-persistent ferocity of the first, and now loose folds of skin and
shattered bone drop into his vision, suspended together upon the hair matted
with thick and oily blood.
In the ever-passing moments he is
aware of the prevalence of life, the continual breaths that leave and leave his
face, as the two of them kneel on, unfocussed
until
the image moves off from itself at speed, a visual doppler pulled out terrible
and senseless and he is awake in the hotel bed, his arms around her from
behind, his hands flat out upon her full belly.
