"Fugue In E-Minor"

Yet another uplifting miniature story....

He stood almost immobile, staring at the man in the bed, his bed. A place once loved and cherished for two decades of his life had been desecrated, violated by the simple apparition. A wave of white-hot rage enveloped him, and he counted backwards to calm himself down, bring himself back to some semblance of reality.

Five.

Reality was blurred, although he saw a photograph of the man on his bed, holding his hands up in submission as if the scene were a grocery store robbery. In the distance, he heard the cries of a woman, a woman he once loved but couldn’t even remember. She was everything, yet thoroughly insignificant.

Four.

He could not understand her words, but heard them, hot and quick and shaking him to the core. “It’s a mistake, it’s all a mistake”. Her face was covered in tears, but she quickly covered herself with her robe and fled.. She would not die for a mistake.

Three.

Things were calming down now. The rage was subsiding, just as he thought it would. He was in control. He noticed classical music pouring from the bedside radio. He turned up the volume. Later it would be said it was to conceal the noise and protect the woman who’d already chosen to protect herself, leaving those who’d loved her to pay the ultimate price of her lapse in judgment. In reality, it was because it was the Fugue in E-minor, dark and aching with pleasure. The viciousness of the pleasure was unbearable.

Two.  

The agony of pleasure hit him like a knife, and there was only numbness, stillness. He was relieved that in a single moment, all of the agony and pleasure and the grotesquely charming man pleading with him for understanding would disappear into the shattered fragments of a life that had never been.

Betrayal erases everything. He was a good man.. He’d spent his life playing by the rules, sacrificing piece after piece of himself for those he loved. He did not deserve betrayal, and felt a sudden jolt of pride and strength at his ability to obliterate it. There was an earth-shattering noise, a scream, the mirror in his mind’s eye left cracked and broken.

And then there was nothing.

One.