Any Ending Will Do - A Short Story.

Warren kept his hands close to the his face in hopes that the blood wouldn't flow too loosely down his chin.  It instead climbed over his fingers - even those spaces tightly locked - that it flowed anyways upon the forest floor.  He hadn't expected the gunshot.  Just moments ago he had been strolling in front of his wife Isabella and hadn't really felt the need for concerns that she might be conspiring to end his life.   They had been happily married for several months in a beautiful and ideal ceremony.  These thoughts and panic were permeating his thoughts.  The blood was cold on his hand and he could feel air passing through the hole in his cheek.  It was meant to be a kill shot.  The terror had spun him in circles, the click and blast of the powder had disoriented his direction.  He turned back about to her general direction and Isabella looked dire.  The pistol had but one shot and she stood still with her arm extended to brandish the pistol at his face.

Never had he seen her so terrifying.

"How am I alive?"  He mumbled out loud though he had meant to only think it.  She clicked in the trigger of the pistol and that was all that happened.  Her face was frantic and savage.   "How am I not dead?"  He asked.

She shrugged as she lowered her arm and the pistol landed among the foliage underfoot.  It was now such a useless thing - a dead weight.  The mortification on her face was not befitting her youth and beauty, and Warren thought of his first wife who had attempted to smother him late at night with a pillow.   He wasn't a terrible man as all of that he was certain.

"Why?"  He asked her.  He felt an anger in his bones, and he could swear he heard them rattling.   He dropped his hand and the air passed freely into his face and it stung.  He winced, and it made his blood boil more.  "Why would you do this my love?

"Why wouldn't I?"  She responded.  She had been wearing a rather frumpy dress and it had been her idea to come out into the woods after the gala and the full moon had provided enough light that they mine as well have been conversing under the luminescence of a dying candle.  The dress sat around her in bunches as she collapsed among the leaves and just before her pistol - which was his pistol as he noted its silver handle and an engraving of a lions head that he had requested for his birthday present.

He stormed toward her  wanting to both choke her and to hug her.  It was an odd feeling, and that was the problem Warren was having.  He loved Isabella dearly.  She had taken great care of his children from his previous marriage and was calm and direct when she spoke to him.  She lived in squalor and each time the carriage dropped her off at that shack of a house Warren had felt it his duty to rescue the damsel in distress.

He shook her by her shoulders the blood drying into dark splotches on his neck elevated by pooling mounds.   "Why would you do this to me Isabella?  Why would you wish to dispatch me from this world?"  It was not fair to Warren that she should be so ungrateful to him for he had rescued her.   Her father had beamed with confidence and respect when he had agreed to allow his only child to be married off to some one as well to do as he, and yet she was ungrateful for her father's sacrifice.   She mocked the arrangement and meant to cause her father more anguish than was necessary.

"To hell with you."  She said in quaint sobs.   There was something in the way she cried that crushed him.  He had done something needlessly wrong.  This was somehow blamed upon a shortcoming of his own.   He had sent his first wife away to the asylum, and was free of those bonds, but she had meant to smother him out of her mental illness.  It was not something he had done, but as far as he could tell Isabella was of sound mind.  He hugged her tightly and she sobbed harder.

"I will fix this my dear."  He felt his gray beard scratching against the youthful flesh of her neck and she cried louder.  The pain she must be feeling, the regretful anguish she was feeling at that moment it was breaking his heart.  That he had somehow pushed her into this, how such a young and beautiful thing should be so distraught into an act of violence, "I'm so sorry.  I will fix this."

He pulled his head away to look into her eyes.  Some of the blood had smeared up on her own cheek and stuck there like pulled apart paint.  He attempted to smile his reassurance but the wound stung when the muscles moved and he simply smirked instead.   "I will call upon the doctor to examine you.  They have methods you know.  To help the mind."

The make up on her face was running down like blood.  And the black of her mascara pooled and mixed in layers with the red.   She looked disastrous and apologetic.  "Yes, yes, that is good.  Send me to the hospital.  They will save me.  I am a mess.  I am a  monster."

Warren struggled up to his feet.  His knees cracked as they bent and he shook as though he were going to loose his footing.  She quickly rose up to him, and helped him stand.  She sniffled back some drooping snot, and chuckled, "Oh how silly this was of me."  She admitted.  "Please send me to see the doctors.  They will cure this madness out of me."

The pistol laid in the brush, silent and content that its purpose was done.