38 The Meadow Untitled Requiem Saramanda Swigart The hate is a small, blurred, abstract thing, and it still pulls at me like one of the smaller black holes—invisible but deadly with mass. There isn’t quite enough of it anymore, but it has brought me again to this terrible event horizon. Invisible, whispers the hate that despairs, and I adjust the scope. Control, whispers the hate that triumphs as my finger depresses the trigger, feels the small, almost erotic give that indicates that I’m a fraction of a centimeter from devastation. The modified bullet in the chamber is eager for its release. After I deploy it there will be nothing left—it will vaporize a two-meter radius around him. His bones will shatter and they’ll find his DNA in the walls and ceiling. This, the lead-up, used to be the sweetest part. My whole being held in my index finger, control of which separates life from oblivion. I do the ritual that divests me of my former name. I am Viola Geist, I think, collector of oaths. I repeat the phrase. I put the mantra to music. Collector of oaths. It is my requiem. I flow easily through the waking world as through a dream. I go from liquid to solid in the dark, flowing unnoticed between the streetlights. I follow him with my sights, my finger calm and dry on the trigger, my mind serene aside from the ambient roil of hatred that churns, subliminal, in its background. I sing the requiem, a simple murder song that shakes the contents of my mind and lets them settle, meaningless, all around me, like shrapnel. This is how I was taught. He’s been checking his phone for the last fifteen minutes. He has an untucked shirt, pants undone but still on. Perhaps he still mourns the one who didn’t love him—the pain whose consequence is not only the trauma of at least twenty-two
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