Fruits of Insanity

an eternity in an instant

A shot cracked the air and everything seemed to pause into a long instant while she stared into her death, rain-damp and chilled and aching with the remnants of earlier blows, her hands and knees abraded against the asphalt, her cheek raw from where he backhanded her against the wall, and she knew she was going to die, but she was trapped like an ant in bubblegum with no chance of escape as the bullet left the barrel, but thoughts run quick as lightning, so she stared, memorizing the last scene she would ever know—his cold face, that ridiculous hat that made him look like an idiot, the alleyway as dark as the set of a film noir, and the rain, falling, falling—and she was angry that this would be her last image, that she would never smell another bonfire or feel the warmth of the sun baking her hair, that the last thing she felt would be raindrops tearing from her eyes and snot running from her nose and a flash of pain as the bullet tore through her outstretched hands and through her heart, ricocheting off her spine to create more trauma that the coroner would document with an impersonal voice when she came across his table in the morgue, but for now, she was getting colder and her body was not obeying anything and he was putting the gun back in his pants as he swaggered away with a phony gangster limp that made him look so stupid and she wished she could find breath enough to tell him so, to have one last laugh in his stupid face before he killed her and left her abandoned and bleeding out in a filthy alley that she’d gone in so that he didn’t hurt her, and now she’d not hurt anymore because the last echo of the shot has died with her.

Prompt 14
the week of November 1

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