Friday morning, 2 a.m., you threw off your heels and broke into a run.

It all makes a funny kind of sense now, doesn’t it? Every quarter spent on the damned slots, the candles burning blue at the end of each night. The stamp. The wax.

I thought I’d die a martyr.

An academic would someday revive my reputation in order to reanimate his own— tell tale of the ouroboros, so tired it mistook its own tail for the head of another. Such promise, they’d say, so embarrassingly defanged.

The pistol was the canary. I saw it and knew the way out. They’d all been shadows, and the cold bite of your silver bullet was the first sunlight I ever saw.

It sounds so morbid.

I trust you know I don’t mean it that way, that the bullet lodged in my gut has made in me a wound like the eye of God.

There is a lock in each key, a wall within each door, and all of it illusory.

We knew it all at once. I, too, feel the pavement under my feet. I hear the crack and whistle of a gun. I will not die a martyr, but I still might die nameless, and that would be so much worse.

Tell me, how warm and familiar has that lie become? The eye of God sees all necessities.