the cicadas are singing somewhere outside and your heart is in your throat and he's looking you in the eyes with something resembling trust and you don't know if you deserve it. your vision's gone all kaleidoscopic and dizzying, the crowd dissolving into fractures of light and cacophony. and still, he's handing you the gun. you feel an oil slick settle under your skin, feel it sizzle and spit in the incandescent heat of a stage turned colosseum, turned hallowed, wretched ground wherever the light finds purchase. you're a demon and he's an angel and neither one of you has ever known the shape of sickness, never felt it settle in the wing-span-bird-hollows of your bones. but you know it now; know the way it slithers, acrid and vicious, carving into the gore of your esophagus. you know it now like an old friend; like the swoop of pale eyelashes against skin; like the slope of his throat, and the way his voice rises at the end as he speaks prophecy into being: aim for my mouth. his mouth—his soft/slanting/beautiful mouth, so far away from your own. fear strings itself between the rungs of your ribcage, burrows deep into aorta and vessel and gore.

but shoot past my ear. and he says it as though you've ever held a weapon with any trace of volition; as though you wouldn't rather face destruction than watch him come to ruin, than let his blood be on your hands (centuries spool out before you, and you're standing in a darkened theatre with a make-believe king and a thane and a ghost. and you can see the woman stained with blood no longer there. you watch the way she tears at her own flesh, scrubs it raw as though she might be made holy once more. the space between your shoulder blades ache). you don't think you could hurt him even if you tried. but the stage lights are so sickly and you're choking back bile and he's a million miles away from you. there's something cracking apart in your chest. the night is heady—the cicadas still sing outside. and you're trembling. you're so close to calling it all off, to pulling him into the wings and out into the amnesia of a heavy night. exit stage right, and all that. but then, trust me. and there it is. it crashes into you with a devastating, inevitable certainty. you'd do anything he wished. you'd rend the sky apart with your teeth. you'd reach into your chest and hand him your all-too-human heart, if only he'd ask. so you hold your breath. you aim. and you pray.