Flash Fiction:  Laced  

CeeCee swung the gun aloft.

A gun doesn’t make a man a monster.  You’re not holding a weapon, there.  See it as an investment, sir.  It’ll never hurt no-one.  Hell, even Gandhi had investments.

That pitch had twisted Gene’s arm as his fingers had traced the vines on the firearm’s flank at a yard sale in Natchez.  At 750, the Smith & Wesson Number 3 was a steal.  True to the trader’s advice, he’d kept it under glass ever since.  You made a killing! his uncle Hodge crowed. 

They’d met on the Rampart streetcar just three weeks prior.  CeeCee’s pop socks and ponytails sparked a base desire.  With its spine unbroken and paper edges shining white, she wasn’t really reading The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.  She was advertising herself, falsely.  Gene knew.

They’d fucked - almost straight away - as soon as they’d rumbled out of the bar back to his shotgun at Sixth and Coliseum.  When she saw the cemetery at the corner she’d cackled.  He didn’t ask why.

Now spotlit by the bulb above, her skin was a discarded canvas, an old sketchbook of scratched out thoughts.  Her hair lay lank over her eyes, belted down by a filthy Hooters baseball cap, its owl clinging drunk to his perch: a schoolgirl gone to rot.

To Gene, slumped in his baggy plaid shirt and jockey shorts, nursing the tail of his Wild Turkey, it all made sense:  the burnt foil, the plastic fumes, the magnolia blooms crowding at the window to witness his doom.  The buzzing flies’ zest for life let Gene resile from his.  He’d asked for this.

As she levelled it, he caught the gun’s casing stained red - the day’s dying rays shot through the pipe haze - God breaking cover.  Crack was cold - brittle, dry bones, hollow as death.  It pared the soul down to a plane of singular motivation.

CeeCee pulled the trigger.