Counterpoint

"W—What's this?" Benjamin started. Daniel stared balefully. Angelique's face was awash in tears. "Y-You t-t-two people wanna kill me 'cause ah sed—ah sed—" he tried to continue, but his breath seemed to fail, fleeing waif-like as his heart cart-wheeled inside his chest.

Awful grimace shimmered Daniel's face. His knuckles went taut and shiny black as the index finger began its awful squeeze. Benjamin watched the gun come up, then go level. Nerve endings screamed. All he could remember now was the explosive sound, followed by the shock and pain of being hit. He'd stood there unbelieving, watching Daniel pull that trigger again and again, announcing the coming of tiny muzzle flashes presaging the awful crack of bullets exploding into agony.

Pain seared his left shoulder. Metal ground through flesh and muscle, shattering his collarbone. Reaching around, he tried to touch the pain; make it go away somehow. Before he could do it, a bullet breaststroked his stomach, jerking him around in horrible pirouette. Deep, throbbing pain wrenched. His brain ordered coping, but it all seemed to be happening much too fast. Another loud, roaring Crack! His right arm dangled, its forearm gone gory. Now there was only the faint sound of shooting as only the pain remained. That was the last human thing he ever felt. It was the moment a bullet struck him fair between the eyes. His head exploded. Two more ripped at his body like banshees, and the long fall began.

Suddenly, it was like that time he'd spent in Alaska, sixty miles below the Arctic Circle. When darkness came, staying round the clock minus a pitiful fifteen-minute respite at noon as the sun peeped through crystals of ice fog. Pain and shock searing his innards seemed to vanish as he suddenly felt whole and miraculously more complete than he could ever remember.

It was strange, being in a kind of place where synapses weren't the first things to pulse thought. Where he couldn't grab hold, even for a moment, to a form, shape or structure he could call his own. Mental circuits flattened as he went long moments without cogent thought—without the searing pain and—seemingly, without a body. At that precise moment, he seemed caught up in the darkest, blackest vacuum, moving in it at windy, breakneck speed. An uncomfortable buzzing took up residence inside his head—the whole of it analogous to an unforgettable Sunday school lesson learned when he was a boy. About moving rapidly through a dark, really black deep valley. About death. About the Twenty-Third Psalm and what it meant to be in the shadow of death—a place he surely knew he was. It was that "Yea" thing. The way his momma used to say it with such prayerful conviction when he was a little kid. He struggled to bring back the quote. Then underneath the ringing, the buzzing and the turgid wind, it all came surging back in the moving darkness, firing into his new consciousness: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death--" clicked into his consciousness, and he knew now what it meant. He was surely dying and soon would be completely dead. And there was no fear; only complete peace and quiet inside him.

It came upon him like deep morning fog. An absolutely delicious thing, putting him into another place, time and dimension that roared. Standing him up inside whatever it was he had become. He couldn't deny its existence. He felt a bit stronger; more robust than he'd been since the age of twenty.

But there was a difference. At twenty, he'd considered himself flawed. Oh, he was strong and wonderful but at the same time psychologically disassembled; somehow mentally incomplete. Suddenly, he seemed to occupy something akin to a brand new house, all its sidings complete, the roof intact, new paint sparkled and the landscaping was in.

It seemed a time for daring—and he opened his eyes—just a little bit at first, and then, chrysalis-like, he seemed to be inside a new Himself! Cocooned in a shining kind of body, he awkwardly slid around inside the body he'd always thought he was. Lifting an arm, he could see a piece of the new Himself, but nobody else in the room could. He knew, because he took a moment to watch them very closely—and Daniel in particular, so as to see what other devilment he was concocting..

Daniel watched him as well, as if to wonder if he would be moving after the shooting. No, Daniel didn't see that arm he was raising. He just sat there across the room staring morosely, beadles of sweat running down and across his face. Angelique, his dear wife, couldn't see him either. She stood alongside Daniel; eyes stretched wide, one hand over her mouth as if to stifle a scream that wouldn't come. The other hand clutched a straight up drink; no ice cubes; no fizzle.

Possessed now of a new and deliberate way of thinking that allowed him to reach startling conclusions in milliseconds—Benjamin thought that he looked a little like he was a few minutes before Daniel had begun shooting. Somehow, he knew that what he was now seeing from the inside was at the same time separate but still closed in by what he knew as the old, human him lying all torn and bleeding there on the bloody and quickly becoming besmirched hardwood floor.