The second body was a man’s. He was middle aged, slightly overweight but overall in decent form: lean, not too thin, not too fat. His silver hair matched a grey buttondown shirt that wasn’t off the rack. Attention to fashion was visible everywhere. Upturned, contrasting-colour cuffs. Alligator-print belt. Perfectly polished shoes. What looked to have been a good hairdo, before the struggle changed that.
He lay prone on the unyielding tile floor. His skin was already bluing, and his eyes, like hers, were wide open, though they didn’t sparkle with light. They were hollow, sucking in the grey ceiling rather than reflecting the light of the sun or moon.
There was no serenity surrounding him. His end had been violent, and the signs of the violence were everywhere. Rips marred the silver shirt. Bruises that looked like they might have come from fists speckled the skin of his arms. A wild look of recognition was frozen on his face. He’d seen what was coming. He couldn’t escape it.
And a knife-wound flowered at his side, bleeding now only a few remaining drops into the crimson pool that had emerged beneath him.
This was reality.
But it wasn’t the way the story was supposed to go. No story should ever be written this way, with this kind of character, or this kind of turn. They were things to be written out, edit away. So that the real story, the good story, could emerge from their absence.
And so the work had begun, and would continue, until the right ending came.