Myer’s Mire

He stood on the mire, its sweet, sickening aroma intertwining with the tendrilic fog snaking around his boots and up into his nostrils.

He had only a Glock 38 and chicken-scratch’d Waffle House napkin. He withdrew the jotting and cleared his throat, words trickling from his mouth like droplets of condensation down a glass of ice water:

“Too long has this day waited. Too long have I suffered in silence. Too long have I taken shit. Too bad it has to end this way.” Horse flys buzzed above their dung-like mud and crickets chirped their nightly tunes. ”... familiar,” he said. His words pooled at the bottom of the mire, unheard; they were an indistinguishable mug-ring of coffee.

The bullet was out the other side of his head before any eye could even register the gun moving. The bloody heap crumpled to the ground where it mired and made a sucking sound with the mud never heard above the ambience. Inattention like a spear driven deeper and deeper into the corpse.