In This Her Final Hate - A microfiction

Anita took the gun off the wall.  It was an antique hunting rifle, the sort that never had fired a shot in its entire life, and she fiddled about with its locks and trigger.   The hammers snapped down and made her jump and smile in intrigue.   She pressed its butt against her shoulder and looked down the sights and mimicked a firing motion accompanied by a very minor utterance of the word "boom."  She carried it with her down the cold, and intimidating halls of the mansion.  An estate so large that she had often found herself lost in its innumerable amounts of halls and rooms.   She held the antique tool in her arms like an assault rifle as though she could empty a multitude of shell casings upon the floor while the barrel flashed and released round after round at the imaginary ghosts in front of her.  There an old employer, there a man who had wolf whistled at her on 8th avenue while she went for her morning jog.  That was back when she was living in a studio apartment with other starving artist.  They had been for all intents and purposes more starved than artist but the old her deemed it the quality of life she deserved.  Another ghost, of her unstable father a shattered bottle in his hand where her imaginary round had fractured through and planted itself inside his ethereal body.  It wasn't too far off from the fate that had befallen him one drunken night at the tavern in midtown when she was twelve years old.  She remembered hearing the news with a cold indifference as though she knew it was going to happen, and she felt it with a vague happiness that she knew only meant that she had hoped it would.

Anita turned another hallway into the grand expanse of the foyer.  She said aloud, in little more than a whispered joke to herself the word, "foyer" and marveled at the absurdity that her house even had such a room.   Below her from the handrail she finally rested the rifle.  Sitting stock down against the marble, and she planted her fists against its flush stone, and gawked like a gangster at all that was hers.   She previewed the glass chandelier decked with fragments of cold nothings falling among the non-existent party goers below, and so she made it real.   She picked up the heavy rifle - but not so heavy as not to able to be thrown - and she hurled it with some trouble out and over the cold nothing, and it connected and broke apart.  Not all of it, only the pieces vulnerable from that angle and it did not have, she was disappointed to find, the same deafening quality its entirety possessed in the back of her mind.  As the small mementos of glass impacted against the floor along with the blunt snapping of the antique stock on the priceless artifact she sighed.   Her fists gripped the railing again and she screamed out into the echoing void and it screamed back.

When Anita threw herself from that spot, she wondered - in the way that only imminent death allows one to wonder - just what it was that made her so unhappy.   Nothing she had determined, at least nothing so awful.   She had spent her life in exhausting pursuit of happiness, of solace that she had not considered her surroundings.   When her husband a particularly well to do mogul pronounced his undying love to her, she knew it was a lie, because he would, and did die.   And with it his love.  What she was left with was an empty house, full of empty rooms, full of empty things.   There had been but several places that memories were ever made between her and the "man of her dreams" but there were so many others where she sulked that she could have done better.   The splatter pattern among the stone flooring just moments away from her skull would probably be more fitting a painting than any she had thrown together in her studio life.  She figured the drab gray could use a little more color, a little more vibrancy, that the house itself deserved more life.  She heard the snap in her neck before the end even came, and there was something sweet and tragic in that noise, but she was gone before she had time to contemplate, and contemplation was one of the greatest assets to being alive.