AN: Yet another cynical writing to go along with "Nothing."

And yes, I do have a depressing outlook on life. Not all the time, but occassionally, when I write stuff such as this. So, enjoy!

I've always been told, by friends, teachers, and all critics alike, to start a story with a "bang," seeing as how modern culture must always get right to the point.

So let's start the story with how he shot me, without mercy, without so much as an apology, without even thinking of the consequences.

BANG!

I, having made no enemies, having really no friends, wouldn't expect a capsule of cold steel jammed straight into my left aorta on what seemed like just any other day. No, it was rather... uncalled for, to be put in terms easily understood. The man, seemingly unknown to me, was at the end of the line, at the end of his life, with no hope left of salvation in this bitter, crule, and rhymeless world.

Perhaps, in order to make more sense, I should recall that I ran a convenience store, one of which was highly underrated, what with its cockraoch-infested cash-register and its far-too-outdated Twinkies and constant smell of 4-year-old piss and dog-shit.

But it was my place, my store, and I liked it the way it was, the way it smelled, looked, felt. It was my pride, my joy, acquired after my father's last breath in which he wished for me to take care of it always, which was of no worry to me, due to the fact that I wasn't getting myself off the ground and flying somewhere. And if people didn't like my store, well, they'd have to drive another sixty miles for their pack of cancer-inducing cigarettes and porno-mag.

And it was just another slow day, another boring day, and maybe it was in the autumn, or perhaps in the summer, when the bell on the door chimed and in walked a single and un-amazing man. There was nothing remarkable to him, he looked just like any other man you'd find walking the streets of any dirt-ball town. Shaggy beard, pock-marked face, tired eyes that longed for a decent night of sleep.

And so he strolled the aisles, uninterested in anything on the shelves, uninterested in the wide assortments of sugar-filled sweets and gut-polluting snack-cakes. He kept his head down, his scruffy hands lodged deep into the pockets of his trucker-style jacket, his clunking over-sized worker-boots scuffing up my nice clean dirt-covered grey floor.

But then something in him changed, like a transformation to decent human-being in rags to hungry blood-lusting beast in rags. Pacing over, a fire growing in his eyes, he told me, while pulling a small black pistol from his pocket, to give him all I had in the register. Well, why should I? was my feeble reply. I was never brave, nor tough, nor strong, so why was it at the most inconvenient time I decided to work up what little testosterone I had in my blood to confront him?

Perhaps I'll never know. I was of no qualm to him. I heard the click in the chamber of the gun, the small spark, the explosion, igniting outward as the bullet flew from the gun like a juggernaut from his cannon, racing towards its only target.

Me.

A lowly convenience-store owner.

Dead within seconds.

I suppose now you want a happy resolution, something to give you comfort. Something like the end of a sappy-ass Disney film in which the prince finally gets to kiss the princess for the one-liner of happily-ever-after. You might want me to say that I became some kind of ghost, coming back from the dead to get vengeance like a reaper-out-of-Hell. That, in the end, after all, the bad guy always gets caught and the good guys always oull out a stifling, rigorours victory in the face of certain demise.

So you think.

But no.

Life is without resolutions.

Life is without rhyme, it is without reason.

And so I lay in the floor of the convenience store, my pride, my joy, sprawled out and staring lifeless, cold, lonely, into the ceiling, the cash-box clean and the floor littered in a deep iron-crimson, a single bullet-shell, and scuff-marks of some desperate bastard's shit-covered shoes.