When her ward spoke he used the present tense, a characteristic that caused untraceable confusion within her prescient mind. How he spoke conveyed something similar to but different from love. What he spoke employed a linguistic form similar to the pitiful supplication of some desperate mendicant.
She was holding the revolver, smoke wafting from its steeled, stub-nosed muzzle. It wound its way up, along the yellowed walls of the tiny apartment that he had been forced to call his home since he lost his financial direction and the trinkets associated with the aspects of a typical human existence.
He had used this behavior before. Once he had attempted to end his life by throwing himself in the path of car careening down a darkened interstate at twilight. When she had abducted him from his own design, he revealed to her a picnic dinner laid out picturesquely on a nearby grassy hill overlooking the sunset’s autumnal reds and oranges. Another time he had thrown himself from the top of a ten story building downward towards the hard concrete sidewalk beneath. As she cradled him in her arms, lighting off for flat plane sufficiently distanced from the area where he may have hidden novel romantic elements, he pulled a small, black box from his jacket pocket and asked her to be his bride for all eternity. Things were different now.
Gradually, the efforts became more efficient and the implements more precise. He introduced pills, then nooses, then knives and now guns. The amorous idolatry had seeped from his eyes and left only calculated determination in its place. The juvenile attempts to turn her affection had yielded to near psychotic threats against his own life. She recalled the way she used to interpret the drama, as playful actions used to summon his puppy love, pharisaic suicide attempts that omitted any sincerity. She remembered a specific instance that involved her ward simulating the consumption of fatal poison only to discover the bottle contained nothing but flavored water. These scenes initially annoyed her but now she longed for their return.
There was no such whimsy in his heart now. Unprompted he had dislodged the gun from its cold box in the attic, loaded it with untested cartridges, placed the barrel against his temple and squeezed the trigger to release the slug. He gave no warning and left no signs of affection for her to dote upon after his inevitable rescue. His words fell like disease from his mouth as he tried to articulate his addiction and her response was a flaccid condolence that exhibited no semblance of empathy.
Then she received her epiphany. As he moaned she began to string together all the events, humorous and morose, that precipitated this one act of self-aggression. She saw before her eyes every instant that had elapsed and every instant that would elapse. They ran together like littoral confluences through the smoke egressing from the gun’s shortened barrel. She looked down on him, there before her with his hands covering his face and the depressed weeping noises escaping between the small spaces that separated his fingers. She recognized in that moment that the same inevitability that allowed him to act so foolishly in the past was actually their shared inevitability. The unwavering knowledge of a vouchsafed future bound them together in a relationship built upon unrequited love…or addiction.
She knew he could not see her. Not in this state. Not in this posture.
She drew back the hammer on the gun and slipped the barrel still smoking into her mouth and squeezed the trigger.