Sheila

Sheila walked into her apartment. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a Wild Turkey. She lit a cigarette and sat at the kitchen table. Sheila looked into her drink, and smoked. ‘Poor fellow,’ she said. ‘He never saw it.’ She saw in her mind the body spin and fall to the ground. Sheila took the notebook she kept in the kitchen table drawer out and placed it upon the navy blue place mat. It was a composition book from the Dennison Stationary Products company out of Framingham Massachusetts. The book bulged with a fat pen Sheila kept inside to mark her place. Sheila flipped the book open, and took a drink. She smoked, and then wrote.

‘Snow fell.’ she wrote. ‘with soft thuds.
and the body fell to the ground.
Bullets suck for you.’

Sheila drank the Wild Turkey deeply, and shuddered. She took her coat off and draped it around her kitchen chair. She turned her chair, and looked out the window. She could only see the building across the way, and if she pressed her forehead to the glass, down into the alley of the urban canyon. She laughed a little then. She took another drink and laughed some more, then took a drag off her smoke.

‘Trigger finger,’ she wrote. ‘soft.
pop, pop, pop, and red pools in
the snow. Brains and blood.’

Sheila fetched some ice from the freezer and dropped the frozen lumps into the bourbon. She poured some Wild Turkey into the glass. She took another drink. Sheila stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. She cocked her head and watched the embers fail to stay alight in the ashtray. Sheila took another drink of the bourbon.

‘Dead man,’ she wrote. ‘in the snow.
Dead men and their tales untold.
Bullets solve them all.’

Sheila closed the composition book, finished her drink, poured another, and dropped in a few more lumps of ice. Sheila lit another cigarette.