John Biscello

He could feel his hand, an undertaker’s apprentice, rosy rash pecking out a tremolo in the palm’s moist center, a fluttery pulse, as his fingers massaged the handle. His fingers ever sensitive to the crushed pollen coating the handle (time and the stranger disagreed in that time stood still while the stranger slowly approached), no, he wasn’t going to pull out his gun and perform some theatrical twirling, some show of ostentation just to justify legend … this time it would be level and direct, the vocabulary of precision: he’d shoot down the stranger point-blank. The stranger was approaching him with the wrong kind of attitude, a sneer that could be psychically sniffed out from a mile away: a broad-chested fugue in a tall hat slowly clarifying and coming into focus (for a moment he imagined he might experience one of those psychic reversals, or existential plot twists, where the stranger turned out to be none other than himself, and mythology and psychology and every other ology would come into play in this desirous motive to shoot down his shadow-self, but no, the man didn’t look like him at all, thank god). He’d generously allow the stranger several more steps, and then the gun, as an engaged extension of his body would reveal itself to the cinematic air, the imaginary X already sketched out on the broad chest, his index finger functioning as a lone operative, folding inward as the knuckle jutted … he’d done it before, so simple, it would always come easy, it was a motion executed like so many other rote and customary motions, a gesture born of rehearsed facility (legend claimed that the earliest rehearsals took place in the adventure of his crib): the raising of a glass, the tying of boot-laces, the petting of a cat. He saw the narrative unfold in a hyper-accelerated time-lapse, hints of fast-track cinema: the gun drawn, the bullet through the painted X, and he standing over the stranger’s body with victorious disdain and little to no regard for consequences or anything near to remorse. Now all he had to do was step into the frame and vision, and both act and direct in the real-time continuity of lore and evolving myth. In the distance, far off, he could hear a train whistle, and his mother calling him home for dinner.