It was the twitching of her fingers that told me something was wrong. They convulsed and wiggled. Like a mass of mating snakes, they continued to twist and clench and lengthen and pinch.
I shot her.
I shot her directly in the mouth.
If these convulsions were simply her death throes, they would have ended by now. As the smoke from the end of the gun cleared from the room, a bit of the haze over my brain did as well. Things were starting to not add up.
I looked around the room, silent and still, except for my pulsating wife on the bed. I had shot and missed four times, yet nothing around the room was amiss. There was no broken lamp, no shattered bedroom window. There weren’t even any holes in the wall or chips in the paint. I stared down at the gun in my hand in disbelief. How could this be?
As my wife seized and spasmed on the bed, I bent to the carpet and plucked up one of the spent shells. The casing looked normal enough. As I peeked inside its hollow inner workings, I saw that I had been had.
Blanks! They were blanks!
The shell casing wasn’t filled with only powder and primer, but cotton and wax residue showed as well. Blanks. That son of a bitch had given me blanks!
I dashed over to the phone, checked the caller ID number. It said private, but I knew who it had been. It was him. It was Allen T. Watts! It had to be!
That lousy rat had set me up! He was the one who called, I just knew it! He wanted to wake her. He knew the time that I would shoot her. He knew just when the right time to call was. He knew I’d get caught holding the gun. And to top it all off, he had given me blanks! He took my real gun and had given me blanks. That bastard. That dirty rat bastard!
He told me to fire from the hall. Looking down at the mess of my wife, I now knew why.
Clarissa gurgled and choked as a crimson bubble formed from the ragged hole blown through her left cheek. Blanks still packed quite a punch. The gas that’s expelled from pulling the trigger, it can still concuss you. It can still do major damage to a person, even kill someone if they were unlucky enough. Unfortunately for my wife, I’m the unlucky one, not her, so she continued to writhe in agony as I tried to think this all out.
It was supposed to look like a home invasion gone wrong. It doesn’t look like that anymore.
The phone rang again. I was about to have some real choice words for Mr. Hollywood, Mr. Private Number, but I saw that it was my neighbor’s name gracing the ID screen. I picked up. When I spoke, my voice sounded hollow and far away.
“Yeah….yup….Yes Mrs. Henderson. I called the police just now, don’t worry. Thank you for checking, it’s all a big misunderstanding. I’ll….yes….yes I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. Thank you. Goodnight Mrs. Henderson.”
I hung up. My entire body felt numb. Cold. Dead. I knew it was only a matter of time before my story was over. Which brings us to now.
At the time of this writing, I have barricaded the doors and locked the windows. I dragged Clarissa from the bed, making sure that her head hit every step on the way downstairs and then out into the garage. She’s in the passenger seat now, barely alive. She’s a tough old bird, I’ll give her that. But I’m not taking any chances. I will not let her survive this.
With the garage door shut and the ventilation hose from the dryer hastily wrapped around my tail pipe, I press my right foot down firmly on the parked car's accelerator.
Exhaust fumes are flooding the car quickly and I know I must cut this note short. I only wanted to be heard, only wanted to be understood. I just needed the world to know who I really was, and who my wife really was, too.
As I write this final paragraph, I look over at my wife one last time. Her eyes are glossed over and blank, but I hope that there’s enough of her left in that skull of hers to register what was happening. I turned the radio on and it was playing a true classic. It was a song by 10cc. As my wife dies next to me, I smile and find comfort in the song.
“A compromise would surely help the situation.
Agree to disagree but disagree to part.
When after all it's just a compromise of
The things we do for love,
The things we do for love”
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