Marriage Bullet

The Unaltered and Unembellished Description of a Dream I Had

by Alexander Knight

    It began very gray and smokey.  Like I passed through a cloud into a smoking dream world.  There had been a war, but I didn’t think of this at the time.  I just remember everything looked like it had been leveled by bombing.  The war had been so severe and so globally destructive that there were no buildings or houses that weren’t reduced to rubble or stone shells of buildings.

    The fires that once burned this place were extinguished, but not from water.  They were extinguished because there wasn’t anything left to burn.  Only ash and smoke remained to testify of the fires that swept whatever place it was I inhabited.

    I remember being familiar with my surroundings in this dream.  I was also familiar with the insecure feeling that I and everyone else lived with.  There were no governments or organized armies left from the war.  At least not where I was; and nobody spoke of them existing anywhere else.  No laws or protection. Anarchy was the recognized government.  It was more noticed than recognized.  The strong ruled the weak and the weak depended on the strong for survival.  Compassion was weakness, and if you were weak it meant you had to guard yourself much more closely.  The inhabitants of the world were faster than a cobra to accuse.

    Forgiveness was not an option.  Mercy stemmed from boredom rather than compassion—boredom from all of the hurting and killing.

    The best way I can describe the justice system of this place is immediate capital punishment.  Most accusations and defenses were observed by a strong one, and it was in everybody’s best interest for someone (sometimes both parties) to die.  Deaths meant more food to go around.  It wasn’t an impartial system at all.  Executions were left to be carried out by the wronged upon the heads of the guilty, seemingly guilty, or sometimes the randomly selected.

    If a wrong was committed people would choose sides, and whoever had the most loaded guns on their side won.

    The guilty were shot to death.

    That’s another thing, nearly everyone had a small six-shooter.  They shot .22 bullets.  Sometimes they looked so small that a .22 bullet would be too big for them.

There weren’t many bullets around, and they were usually held by the strong ones.  The strong man residing in my area entered the scene.  He was taller than me, older, and bearded. The people here feared and respected him, and it showed in their actions. Everyone either approached him respectfully, asking for something, or they kept their heads low and moved out of his trajectory. He walked around with swagger, smirking in mockery of everyone he looked at. He didn’t mince words and he was well aware that he was one of the alphas in this world.  He smiled whenever he had the chance to deny somebody of something they needed desperately.  He mockingly smiled so they’d get mad and give him a reason to kill them.

What some knew about this particular strong one was that he smiled at these opportunities because he was imagining himself killing nearly everyone he talked to.  Killing would mean more food for him and his wife and son.

It was a desperate world he lived in and he had adapted to it faster than others.  This is why he was one of the strong ones.  He hadn’t always been the tallest or the strongest, but he had been the fastest to start killing his competition, so he became the strongest by elimination.  

He smiled when he killed.

He smiled a lot.

His expression flattened though when the subject of bullets came up, because bullets were serious.  Bullets were the currency of this world.  If a person needed a bullet that person would trade food, clothes, favors, or anything for it.  Bullets meant people’s death but not your own because you could protect yourself.  You could protect your family, kill people for their food, or kill for anger.

Bullets were the greed of this world.

Bullets were life.

What happened next was vague, but I knew that a girl tried to wrong me.  She was a beautiful girl with dark hair and dark eyes. She wore a red dress; almost as though she'd been on her way to someplace nice when the bombing started and she just never changed.  
Whether this girl actually meant harm to me I never knew, but a wrong was done to me and the strong one I described above heard about it.

I had to get bullets from him.
I had to kill her or others around me would think I was weak.

He let me load three bullets into my six-shooter after mocking me for needing bullets against a small girl.  There were not-so-small girls who were dangerous enough to create a need for bullets.  The strong one wouldn’t have mocked me for long if this girl in question was a larger female.

She was not a larger female, however, and I was surprised that he didn’t mock me more.

Truthfully, this girl had no fight in her. She didn't object to the accusations or the sentence.

She knew she’d wronged me, she knew nobody was backing her up, and she knew that I had bullets and she had none.  She knew that the bystanders were all hoping for an excuse to involve themselves with her death.  Executions were the best entertainment available.  If she fought me it would invoke the wrath of those bystanders, and her death would be more painful and even lonelier.

In this world, death by mob is worse than single-handed execution. A bullet to the head or being trampled to death by screaming, hate-filled animals. Easy decision.

She was as smart as she was helpless.

I approached her.  I saw the pain and loneliness behind her blank stare.  She had the look of a motherless child, and she was beautiful.  Her nose was small, and slightly narrow.  She had on red lipstick and her lower lip extended beyond her upper lip just .  Her brown hair was cut just above her smooth shoulders.  Her brown eyes reflected what little gray light there was.

I remember her eyes very vividly because they were empty and something behind them was pulling back from me.  She thought I was a killer at heart.

She knew that even God wasn’t going to save her.

Nobody was going to save her.

She was alone.

Because of the hopeless glint behind her eyes I never would have guessed that this girl had intended to wrong me today, or that she meant to wrong anybody any day.  This is what her eyes said, though I didn’t care at the time.  Nothing could sway the heartlessness I felt towards her.  Survival of the fittest had made me selfish, logical, and numb.  My eyes were only for seeing. My eyes saw only that she had to die and that she was beautiful.

My six-shooter was held firmly in my right hand which hung stiff at my side.  I came closer to her.  She didn’t move.  I raised the pistol from where I had it and shot the girl in her right thigh.  Her face didn’t move and her mouth stayed shut.  Her eyes, which had been staring at my chest, now stared emptily at the ground just behind me.  She leaned on her right side, and the breathing I heard through her nose became more rapid.

I raised the pistol again and shot her in her left forearm.

Obviously, this was not the typical way a person was killed in this world, but it’s how I did it to this girl.  I don’t know why I shot her thigh and her forearm but I did.

I just did.

A granite, block wall rose behind the girl and I gently leaned her against it.  I was heartless, but not cruel.  I wouldn’t hit her or yell at her.  I would be a gentleman about it.

I had to be a heartless gentleman, however, because real manners were considered weakness.  The weak in this world were often targeted just for being weak.  I didn’t want to be targeted after this incident; not when I was about to use my last bullet to still this girl’s heart.

She now wore a white t-shirt, and I pressed my left hand on her right side of her chest.  I was feeling for a heartbeat, which was very present.  Why her heart was on the right side of her chest I do not know.

I came in a little closer to her and pressed the muzzle into her chest where her heart was.

She was so beautiful.

I couldn’t help but do what I did next.

I fired my weapon into her heart.  I laid her down on the wall which had now become a raised sofa with no arms, and I kissed her.

She kissed back.

The crowd didn’t walk away or leave.  They just disappeared having been satisfied with how things went.  The presence of the smiling strong one left as well.

She was sideways now, facing me, and I turned my head so that I could kiss her.  She seemed as though a hundred spotlights were focused on her as I saw myself kissing her. She was brilliant and glowing.

I felt something.

The feeling was guilt.  I had killed something capable of good.  The numbness left my heart the moment my lips touched hers.  The empty space it left behind became filled with guilt and pain for what I’d done.

The gray background darkened.

But in the same instant the guilt, the pain entering my heart, turned to warmth and my lips absorbed that warmth as I kissed her.  She sucked my pain from me like it would save her from the wounds she’d received at my hand.  My left hand was on her face, her neck, and arm.  My right hand still held the smoking, emptied six-shooter.

That six-shooter that had felt like a power surge seemed to be draining the warmth and strength out of my right arm.  My arm felt cold, like I’d slept on it.

My strength failed me because I had killed something good; something beautiful and innocent.  I’d shot the last unicorn.  I’d mortally wounded a young fawn.

But she didn’t die.

Instead she kissed me more.

She stayed steady and warm.  Her lips moved against mine just as sensually as they had in the first motion.

She was forgiving me.

Despite my attack she trusted me.  I was her only hope.  She wanted to live and she wanted to live with me.

Me!

I was the only person she knew would never hurt her.  She had absorbed my pain and knew my heart.  Her forgiveness turned into passion, and her passion fueled the fire that burned inside her.  She burned for me.
I was on fire myself as well.

The harder she kissed me the more strength she seemed to gain, and the more strength she gained the harder she kissed me.

I realized she loved me.  She wanted me to love and protect her for the rest of her life.  I loved her back and would kiss her and hold her hard against me for the rest of my life.  The bullets I’d get would destroy anyone who’d ever wrong her, hurt her, threaten her, or stand tall against her.

Her failed execution became our marriage and our marriage was my new obsession.  My life and my death.

All of my strength was hers.

We kissed and we kissed hard.  We parted lips eventually but not faces.  We breathed heavily and I could see all of her wounds at once.  They seemed small now; now that I had seen the size of her desire for life and love.

The wounds shrunk against her body.

Another girl approached, and she knew that I was confused when the girl I had shot in the heart didn’t die.

“Just because there’s a heart-beat doesn’t mean that’s where her heart is.” She mocked.  She wasn’t glad that my wife had survived; she was just as past feeling and selfish as I had been.  But that selfish girl would wrong someone someday and be killed.  That knowledge satisfied my anger for her mockery.

For now I only knew love for the girl who held my life in her hands.

I was her love and her passion.

I was her husband.

I was her servant and determined guardian.  She could count on me.  She could trust me.  She could hide from bullets behind me.  I would take her pain from her like she’d taken mine.

I loved her and the feeling of it was worth all the bullets, respect, and pain that the world had to offer.

This is how I felt.

Then I woke up.

For days I forgot her face.

I forgot her name though I never knew it.  I only remembered the feeling she gave me, and I searched that world for her until I finally found her guarded in my real-life memories.

Now that I’ve remembered and written it all down I am looking for her in this world.  The real world.

She still has my heart, I know, because it still hurts.

2008