Murder Story
While he was asleep, I could hear his breathing. It was quiet and rhythmical. It sounded more like someone playing a piece of music on a very small instrument.
The pistol was lying on its side on the coffee table – looking a lot heavier than it actually was. I lie on my side when I’m asleep too. The pistol was asleep. I sat up on the sofa and rubbed my eyes with my hand.
I don’t know why we’d had to sleep on the sofa.
Someone came into the room and sat down on a chair opposite us. I pointed my finger at him.
“Careful man, that thing’s pointing right at you!”
I gestured towards the pistol.
The guy looked a little concerned.
“You brought it back with you?” he said. He looked across the coffee table at me. His look said that I should have left it somewhere else.
I yawned. Outside, the sun had come up. It sat, low and orange, in the wintery sky. There were no clouds. Today, I thought, the sky was going to be blue. My thoughts went back to the flat we had left the night before and to its occupant. If they hadn’t found him already, then he was about to be late for work.
Somewhere in the building, someone was drilling.
“So, is it still loaded?” the guy in the chair asked. Behind me, the murderer slept quietly on the sofa. He might as well have been a cushion or a magazine.
I looked at the pistol.
“Yeah,” I said. “Be careful with it.”
The guy in the chair said that I was stupid to have left a loaded gun on the coffee table.
“Sorry,” I said. I was still quite sleepy.
He was right, though. Coffee tables are not the right place for loaded guns. Coffee tables are for coffee cups. I felt bad. What if someone had come in while I’d been asleep and tried to drink from my gun, thinking it was a coffee cup?
The guy in the chair relaxed a bit and apologised for telling me off. I must have been looking a bit upset or something.
Then he gently explained to me that the coffee table was not the right place for loaded guns. Coffee tables, he said, were for TV remotes and books.
What if, he asked, someone had tried to read my gun? Why, they’d have blown their head off before they’d even finished the first chapter.
The guy smiled and picked up the pistol. He slid a catch on the side of the handle and removed all the bullets from it and put them on the table. They looked like a clutch of tiny, golden eggs.
An attentive mother would instantly have realised that one of the eggs was missing. Only one. That was my fault. I had helped it hatch last night.
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josh thomas was murdered. just kidding, he's okay. at least, the last time we heard from him he was...