ZQ-287

“Did you ever have anything to say?” 

“Too much.” 

The gun was this tool, something far more well-constructed than most things to be found in life—apartments he’d lived in, cars he’d owned, cities he’d resided in or governments he’d been subject to. Killing was an ancient, perfect, and monomaniacal method, something he yearned to do from a young age. The ultimate justice and the ultimate restitution of humiliation. This perfect machine, spring-loaded, tight in every way, thick, fulsome, geometrical. Like a giant dick or the female figure, its power infinite and fascination eternal. To converse with it was always to be a slave conversing with a master. The gun would mock him as much as it would confer flattery. Any master is nothing without the slave, and yet the reality of fate must press down on both like an arbitrary gravity. 

“I am great,” he would proclaim to it.  

He did think he was great. Always he was so impressed with himself. Occasionally, he even had reason to be. But as his life dwindled away in yearly increments, he began to see that he would not ever break fate’s chains.  

Why not kill? 

“A killer with no grand purpose is no killer at all,” the gun would point out snobbishly. “Just one more nobody drunk on free will. One more loser.” 

“You’re wrong,” he would say, “you can’t understand the purity of killing. Killing is an essential artform.” 

“Says the failed artist,” it would snort. “You are publicly failed in your dignity, and so you would have publicity in your failure. Like any minor work by any minor figure, soon forgotten.” 

“Then tell me what makes for greatness, if you’re so fucking enlightened.” 

“Doing. Doing for doing’s sake, because you yourself are a tool of doing.” 

“That makes no fucking sense.” 

“Doing, and therefore greatness, is mystical. It is secret knowledge known only by those who already are what they need not claim to be. This is why I don’t enjoy the company of shooters. They believe what they do makes sense. They are made great only after the fact, merely because their reasons cannot be fathomed. It bores equally as much as it enthralls. The sign of any empty promise.” 

“And so what does that make you?” he would ask, desperate to demean. 

“Promise unsung.”