It was a Monday in November. She had texted that she would meet him at the arcades at five. His last visit to the seaside resort had been with her and he had forgotten how gray and desolate the place was. He had only eyes for her then, and it didn’t matter that the columns were crumbling or that paint was peeling off the walls. Carla made everything brighter. They had walked the whole length of the colonnade and wondered what it had looked like a century ago when the rundown resort was the summer playground of the rich and famous. Carla had pretended to be a Hungarian duchess who dropped her earrings on the green felt of the casino, everything on red at the roulette table. Listening to her he heard violins playing a waltz. Kissing her he tasted champagne on her lips. The streetlights were crystal chandeliers and the broken flagstones shone like Italian marble. It didn’t matter that Carla was always late and left too quickly after making love. It didn’t matter that he never knew when or if he would see her again. And he hadn’t heard from her in a while, until that short text had summoned him.
Arcades at 5. I will see you one last time.
Carla appeared at the end of the colonnade, a silhouette in a black coat. She walked fast like somebody who had business to attend. She stopped a few steps from him, the distance between dream and reality, and held out her hand as if he was a stranger she had just met. He didn’t take the offered hand, he didn’t move at all.
She said: “I’m leaving. I will never come back.”
She took a package wrapped in tissue paper out of her pocket and handed it to him. Her fingers brushed a lock of hair from his forehead. She smiled and walked away. The wind whipped her coat and she was gone.
He sat on the steps leading to the beach and opened the package. He knew what it was, from the shape and the weight, before seeing the black metal that reflected the streetlights. The fog was coming in, extending its tendrils under the arcades. He felt cold, colder than the gun that still retained warmth from its stay in Carla’s pocket. He walked to the edge of the water. The tide was coming in and the sand felt muddy and sticky. Invisible seagulls screeched the shrill cry of harpies. He unwrapped the gun and stuffed the tissue paper in the pocket of his coat. His knowledge of guns was minimal. He had visited a shooting range once and remembered enough from the experience to figure out the safety catch. The seagulls’ cries were ear-piercing; they must be circling right over his head.
“Sounds of hell,” he muttered.
It would be easy, probably painless – this wasn’t something you could test beforehand, so he couldn’t be completely sure – and clean, if he walked into the sea. He would be gone as if he had never existed. It was fitting in a way. Did he really exist before meeting Carla? The thought struck him as ridiculous and melodramatic, a hiccup in what had been for months a perfect romance. A seagull cried again and it was mocking him. He looked at the gun in his lap and wondered if it had been used before. He looked at the colonnade and wondered if Carla was behind a pillar, watching him. Of course not. The wind had taken her. She had given him the gun, the only anchor that could have weighed her down. She had written the perfect ending.
He shivered. Cold water was getting in his shoes. He thought she should have broken up with him in the summer, in a golden wheat field, or better, among the poppies. It reminded him of a poem or a story or a song, he wasn’t sure, except it was about death and the color red. Nothing kills a romantic fantasy as effectively as cold feet.
He ejected the magazine and threw the gun in the ocean. On the way back to the colonnade, he dropped the magazine in a dumpster. He kept one bullet as a souvenir.
M.E. Proctor worked as a communication professional and freelance journalist. After forays into SF, she’s currently working on a series of contemporary detective novels. Her short stories have been published in the U.S., Canada and Europe (among others: Willesden Herald, The Blue Nib, Rue Scribe, Ripples in Space). She lives in Livingston, Texas.
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