The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. I

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Man comes into the small white room where you are sitting and tells you he has a gun. He is of medium height, nearly clean-shaven, wearing a seersucker suit that fits his shape. He has a look in his eyes like light is being strangled and he likes it, but you don’t see any gun. You are seated on a small metal chair beside someone you used to remember, used to like or know in some way beyond just being, though now it doesn’t seem like either of those are so much true. You had not meant to be here today. You feel as if you have been shrinking for several years. Before you can think any more about that or about the gun or what is coming through the windows framing the far wall, the man pulls out the gun and holds the gun up at you and shoots you in the face. The sound is loud and silent at the same time. It is over before it ends. You aren’t there to see your blood hit the light and hit your flesh and hit your friend who was no longer such a friend as he had been. It splashes on the fine seersucker suit of the man before you who has shot you and whose expression has not changed, he is standing still in the white room with his skin there and he is raising up his hands, he is beginning to speak aloud in a voice that comes not from inside him but from almost on the air itself, the air with your blood inside it, where you had lived once. No one is moving in the room.

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