All That We Are

s she beat against my chest with her fists, it was as if scores of church bells were pealing within me. Her blows were weak and desperate. She tired easily and simply pushed me away, turning her back.

As I stood there, watching the gentle curve of her neck, her upper body racked with sobs, I found myself growing deeply attracted to her.

Perhaps I should have let her do it, this exquisitely wretched stranger in the park. I could simply have watched her, observed those delicate feet dangling and twitching inches above the ground, while the coarse rope worked on her trachea and spine. Looking back, I am now utterly certain that I should have let her die, up there in the dark canopy of that oak tree.

It's all largely irrelevant now though - what I ought or ought not to have done. After all, I went to the same desolate spot of this park in the early hours of the morning looking for the same thing didn't I?

After a time, she calmed herself and turned to me, her hazel eyes rheumy and glinting sharply in the moonlight. I expected shame or embarrassment, but those eyes were no place for cliches. I watched them with both an intensity and curiosity I had never previously known.

" Why?" She implored. Her voice wavered and cracked, but there was a strange purpose, a dulcet determination I found almost heartbreaking.

I shrugged my shoulders and lipped a cigarette, unable to find anything appropriate to say.

The wind whipped up and blustered through the small copse of trees, rustling funeral-dry leaves in the darkness above.

I lit the cigarette and dragged deeply. When I looked up again she was staring fiercely at me, into me. The question still burned in her eyes.

" I don't know," I replied softly, simply. How foolish I must have sounded.

" You-don't-know?" She pronounced each word slowly, gravely. There was a patient, quiet venom in her voice. " What gives you the right?"

I mused over the words, and before I was aware of it, before i could prevent it, the truth spilled from me like blood from a gaping wound. " Because I care about you."

She laughed. It was a dry, bitter sound, weak.

" You care about me? You don't even know me!"

" That's how I feel," I said quietly.

" You bastard!," she spat and threw herself onto the bench beneath the oak tree

A silence lapsed. I couldn't be sure for how long, but it seemed an age, this dull pendulous silence.

" How's your neck?" I offered finally. I couldn't bear her silence. She rubbed it gingerly. It had begun to bruise. She had long since stopped spluttering and wheezing, but her throat and neck still pained her. That much was evident.

" It hurts like hell okay." I offered a cigarette, for lack of anything else to give. I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming urge to give to her and to never stop. What it was I was meant to give I can't be certain.

" I don't smoke, it's a filthy damned habit," she retorted angrily.

I think I smiled. I found the idea of such an aversion to so simple a vice quite bizarre, particularly in one who had come to a desolate park at two in the morning to hang herself. But then this situation, the ‘us' out there in the wintry dark was equally if not more bizarre.

" You'll thank me," I said presently, knowing that if any thanks were due it was I should be offering them. She stood, her fists knotted in trembling balls of anger.

Tears now. Streams rolling across her cheeks into the tender hollow of her throat.

" Thank you?" She yelled. " What do I have to be thankful for? My life? Your heroic deed? What?" She threw her arms up in the air. Her entire body was shaking. " Why am I even talking to you? You arrogant son-of-a-bitch."

She paced up and down, one hand in her hair, the other resting against the small of her back.

" Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just maybe, I didn't want this?"

" No I didn't," I replied. Again my answer was sodden and inept. She was drawing up all of my stupidity, drawing it to the surface. I felt naked out there in the cold. I hated her for that, but nothing, absolutely nothing else.

" If what you're saying is true, why did I choose this place? Look at it!" She swept her arm and I glanced around me. It was indeed remote, choked with trees, gnarled brambles and skeletal thickets.

"I know what you're feeling," I said. I really knew her pain, and I would gladly have eaten it, gorged on that tender poisoned meat until I choked. But, as I was slowly realising, it was not mine to take.

She said nothing. She merely took a considered step forward and levelled her glare at me. Her eyes were a vicious streak of black mascara, her lips a bloody blear of lipstick. I found it strangely compelling that she had taken the time to make-up her face.

Before I could react, her hand screamed up out of the gloom and struck my left cheek. I was more aware of the sound than the pain, which bit and lashed my face. She withdrew her hand and we were left staring at each other.

We were, I think, on the brink of something: Understanding perhaps. We were both keenly aware of it, but neither of us could fathom it. At the time, the only thing I knew was that the universe seemed, if only briefly, to expand, horizons split open like lopped grins, and for a brief moment, we stole a glimpse of hope.

" I'm going," she said finally, clearing her throat.

" looks to me as if this is the only place you have left." I nodded to the noose, hanging stiffly from the tree.

She smiled sadly.

" At least I have something." She was glorious in her defiance. I wanted to hold her, but she had resolutely crossed a line that I had neither the inclination or nerve to myself.

" Doesn't seem like much of an option," I replied.

My fingers teased the stock of the .38 snub-nosed revolver in my jacket pocket.

" There's so much distance for you still to cover," she said with a sudden unnerving tenderness. She stroked my cheek. It felt like a whisper of wind. " You can't stop it. It's not your right. You can't stop that which was meant to be. Don't you understand?"

I did. Though she would never have believed it. She knew what I was there for.

" What happened her changes nothing," she sighed. My heart ached and surged at my chest.

Then, as suddenly and violently as I had discovered her, she turned and walked away. I felt the world slipping beneath me, away from me.

I fished out the gun and leveled it in her direction, aiming for the back of her head. Before I drilled the solitary bullet, my bullet, into the her, there was a flash of clarity, of blinding lucidity and the world rushed back with tremendous force. The night was alive, it had a wondrous texture and taste.

The top of her skull flew away into the night. Shards of bone and gristle leapt into the air in a veil of deepest, most hideous red.

She fell.

Afterwards I walked along the river-bank for hours, watching the gentle plumes of mist curling up into the early morning sunshine.

We had both sought the same end there in the park, but it was I who lacked conviciton. She, this unnameable beauty, found what she was looking for, even if only in the kindness of a stranger.

They can find me if they so wish. This was no murder.

Besides, I already pay the price and turn and rot in the heat of this afterglow, now and every day for the rest of my life.

As we all do.

As surely we all must