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Fiction Short Story

Burr T. Allen

The Write of Murder

There was a scent of pollen in the crisp morning air of the foothills. Spring buds were on the trees. The meadow grass was pale in variegated green, the light greens of sun-starved growth. I felt the give of the newly thawed earth beneath my step.

I walked aimlessly up the slope of a hillock, admiring the vista in its winter garb. The mountaintops were like fountains of white oil paints spewing forth in constantly changing hues in their cascade down the mountain slopes.

My thoughts were distracted from the troubles I had left behind. I had wiped them from my mind. I couldn’t see the blood from the murders, or the lady’s shadowy figure running from the lounge, that haunting familiar figure that both repelled me, and awakened an animal instinct deep inside. I knew her, I knew her as someone else though, not a cold-blooded murderer.

I left the office late last evening, just after the murders. I had been walking ever since midnight. I was maybe twenty miles into the foothills. With the coming of dawn, the never-ending spring clouds had cleared. I was relaxing in the beauty that surrounded me. The murders were far from my mind.

A shadow, small at first, rapidly grew as it crossed the meadow.

There was an explosion of wings in front of me. Startled, I saw a chicken hawk hop twice and then I could almost feel his efforts as he pumped his wings to climb back into the sky. He had a black snake in his talons, its largeness weighing heavy on the hawk’s flight.

I watched as he struggled to gain rhythm in his awkward flight, ever climbing higher until he was a dark spot with a dangling tail in the sky. A separation occurred. The snake fell rapidly to the earth, the hawk following it in short lazy circles. His noon meal lay dazed on the ground, a predator soon to submit to being the prey.

Another hawk joined the feast. I was mesmerized by the age-old ritual of the food chain. One dead and two feasting, surviving to kill again.

My mind swiftly returned to the murders. The woman shot in the face, blood splattering her white blouse, the impact of the bullet sitting her back into her chair as blood pulsed from where her nose had been. Red hair and blood stuck to the wall behind her in a kaleidoscope’s pattern.

The man stood quickly. Another shot exploded from the gun. He bent with a jerk, clutching at his crotch. His face twisted. He looked up only to receive a bullet to the face, and teetered like a plastic toy he tumbled slowly to the floor, face down. A spasm racked his body, while a pool of blood grew around his head.

The shooter turned the gun back to the lady. Blood had soaked her blouse. Her head hung limp, chin on her chest. The blood had darkened. It ceased to flow from her once attractive face.

The shooter emptied the gun into the dead lady’s belly. Each of the five shots made the body jerk, then bend a little forward until, on the last shot, the body, on the edge of the chair, recoiled once more to the impact. The final recoil caused her to fall forward, face down, to the floor.

There was a hollow silence in the lounge, as if all life had stopped, for what seemed to be an eternity. The silence was broken by a piercing scream from one of the female patrons. It seemed to awaken the shooter. She looked around like a chicken pecking for seed. A collective gasp washed over the lounge. The shooter then turned and rushed out the door.

All my worries came flooding back. My protagonist was dead in the fifth chapter. How? Just how was I going to finish my novel?