It was 3:47 a.m., and the air was thick with the kind of filth you can only taste after a long night of self-loathing and bourbon. Somewhere east of shame and just west of a blackout, she stood silhouetted against the slatted blinds like a pagan deity of unresolved daddy issues and second-hand lingerie. The pistol in her hand wasn’t for theatrics it was chrome, cocked, and kissed with fingerprints that didn’t belong to her.
She wore nothing but a loose tee that smelled like ashtrays and desperation. The hem barely skimmed the tops of her thighs, and the shadows clung to her hips like ex-lovers with unfinished business. She didn’t flinch as the blinds whispered secrets across her back—every line a lash from some old sin.
The gun glinted like a question she already knew the answer to. Who? What? When? Where? How? Why? Pick one, it’s a loaded quiz, and there’s no prize for passing.
The room was a riot of half-read Bukowski, smudged vinyl sleeves, and the kind of vinyl couch that sticks to your sweat and screams when you peel off. A single lamp buzzed in the corner, flickering in rhythm with some God awful track playing on repeat, something French and erotic and dead inside.
The coffee table was littered with the aftermath: lipstick-stained filter tips, a half-empty syringe filled with God-knows-what, and a Polaroid of a man whose eyes had been scratched out in ballpoint pen. Maybe her father. Maybe her fixer. Maybe herself in drag.
She’d told me she was done with men, but not in the empowering TED Talk kind of way. More like the way a junkyard dog gives up on escaping, resigned, snarling, seductive in her doom. Said she’d found truth in silence, in chemicals, in the unbearable buzz of fluorescent lights that never fucking sleep.
But the way she handled that revolver made me think she still had one or two monologues left, sharp, cruel ones that make men forget how to beg. "Don’t move," she hissed, not to me, not to anyone in the room, but to the memory squatting in the corner, bloated with guilt and reeking of cheap rum. Her voice was shredded velvet. Beautiful. Broken. Dangerous.
I didn’t speak. Not because I was afraid, no, that had left me years ago, during a peyote deal gone sour in Vail, but because whatever was about to happen deserved its own silence-a sacred, sexless reverence reserved for real endings.
She turned slightly, just enough for the light to catch her eye, that wild glimmer you only see in people who’ve truly let go of consequence. Her finger danced on the trigger like it was a lover’s pulse, and for one impossible second, I swore the world stopped to see if she'd do it.
Not shoot, no, I was never that important.
Shoot the past.
Shoot the idea of comfort.
Shoot the last fuck she had left to give.
And maybe she did. Or perhaps the click I heard was just the blinds snapping shut. Either way, I left without pants, without pride, and with a hard-on for oblivion that wouldn't go soft no matter how long I stared into the rearview.
She’s probably still there bare-assed, blistered, holy in her unwashed gospel. Waiting for another idiot with a camera, a question, or a fetish for annihilation.
And if you’re reading this wondering how it all ends, here’s the rub: it doesn’t.
Not for girls with guns and ghosts between their legs. Not for bastards like me, still chasing the next story down a dead-end alley with blood in their teeth and ink under their nails.
- jspc
