I was twenty-one. Life, despite the increasingly bizarre news reports about metallic beans and random shrapnel, felt… good. Rina and I were navigating adulthood together, our bond deepening with each shared dream and every silly argument over who left the milk out. The future felt bright, stretched out before us like an open road, full of possibilities.
Then came the last day of the third week of July. I remember the date so vividly, seared into my memory like a brand. It had started as a perfectly ordinary summer day. The sun was a warm, comforting presence in a clear blue sky, the kind of day that made you want to laze around in a park or grab an iced coffee. Rina and I had planned to do just that. We were walking down a busy street, sunlight dappling through the leaves of the trees lining the sidewalk. Rina was laughing, her head thrown back, the sound like wind chimes, telling me about a ridiculous email she'd received from her part-time job. I was watching her, a stupid, happy grin plastered on my face, thinking how lucky I was. The city noise – the distant rumble of traffic, the chatter of passersby, the faint thrum of music from a nearby shop – was just a pleasant background hum to our little world.
Then, the hum shattered.
It happened so fast, it felt like a scene ripped from a badly edited movie. A man. He seemed to materialize from the crowd, though in retrospect, he must have been there all along, just another face until he wasn't. He was unremarkable, maybe in his early thirties, nondescript clothes, a face I wouldn't have looked at twice. But then he raised his arm, and something glinted in his hand.
My world narrowed. Time stretched, becoming thick and syrupy. I saw the glint, registered it as metal, a gun, but my brain couldn't process it fast enough. I remember a shout, not mine. A figure, another man, older, maybe late twenties or early thirties too, lunged forward, seemingly from nowhere, trying to get between the gunman and… Rina.
A deafening crack echoed, ripping through the lazy afternoon air.
It was a sound that bifurcated my life: before the shot, and after.
The man who'd tried to intervene stumbled, a pained grunt escaping him, but he hadn't been the target. The bullet found Rina.
I saw her flinch, a small, surprised gasp. Her eyes, which moments before had been sparkling with laughter, widened in shock, then confusion. A dark stain, impossibly red, blossomed on her light blue shirt, right over her heart. She swayed, her hand reaching out, not towards me, but just… out, as if trying to grasp something that wasn't there.
The world around me went silent, then roared back with a terrifying, deafening intensity. The cheerful street scene became a nightmarish tableau. Faces in the crowd were frozen in horror, mouths agape. Someone screamed. But all I could see was Rina.
She crumpled. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Something inside me snapped. It wasn't a conscious thought, not a decision. It was pure, primal rage, a black, suffocating tide that washed over everything. The vibrant colors of the day bled into a monochrome of fury and despair. My vision literally tunneled, the edges blurring into darkness, focusing solely on the man with the gun, who was now looking down at Rina with an almost… blank expression.
I didn't even register moving. One second I was rooted to the spot in horror, the next I was a storm of motion. I had a ballpen in my jacket pocket – a cheap, plastic thing I used for jotting down notes. I don't remember pulling it out. I just remember the feel of it in my hand, a pathetic weapon, yet in that moment, it felt like the only tool I had.
I slammed into him. He was surprised, his attention still on Rina. We went down in a tangle of limbs. The gun skittered away across the pavement. I didn't care about the gun. I only cared about the searing, all-consuming need to make him pay, to extinguish the life that had just extinguished Rina's.
My hand, clutching the ballpen, moved with a will of its own. I felt a sickening give as it plunged into the soft flesh of his neck. Once. Twice. I don't know how many times. There was a gurgling sound. Warm, sticky liquid coated my hand.
Then, hands were pulling me off him. Shouts. Chaos.
The red haze slowly, agonizingly, began to recede, leaving behind a desolate, hollow landscape. I was on my knees, shaking, my chest heaving. The gunman lay still, a grotesque parody of life, his eyes wide and unseeing, the pen still protruding grotesquely from his throat.
Then, I saw Rina again. People were around her, someone was on the phone, their voice frantic. But she was so still. Too still.
The wail of sirens approached, a mournful sound that seemed to mock the summer day. Uniformed officers arrived, their faces grim. An investigator, a tired-looking man in a rumpled suit, knelt by the gunman's body, his gaze sweeping over the scene with a practiced, detached air. He didn't look at me for long, just a quick, assessing glance. The details of his face, the pattern of the cobblestones beneath my knees, the scuff marks on the gunman's shoes – they all seemed unnaturally sharp, etched into my mind with painful clarity, even as the broader world felt distant and unreal.
An ambulance pulled up. Paramedics rushed out, but they went to Rina first. There was a flurry of activity, hushed, urgent voices. Then, a white sheet. They covered her. My Rina. Covered her like she was just… a thing.
They took the gunman's body away too, loaded onto a different gurney. I watched them go, a numb spectator to my own life imploding.
The investigator asked me some questions, his voice low and monotone. I answered. Or I think I did. The words felt like they were coming from someone else. My mind was a blank, echoing void.
After that, there was… nothing. No follow-up calls from the police, no news reports identifying the gunman or explaining his motive. It was as if the universe had swallowed the event whole, leaving no trace, no explanation. Rina was gone. The man who killed her was gone. And I was left with the blood on my hands and an emptiness so vast it threatened to consume me. The world kept spinning, people kept laughing and living, but for me, the music had stopped. Permanently.