The revolver lay smoking on the desk, breathing its last as surely as the man who had just used it to kill himself.
The table was a mess, and not only because of the blood that was now saturating its unvarnished top, but prior to that crimson spill it had been a surface that had tried, and often failed, to contain the dead gentleman’s spasms of creativity.
He had been an artisan, that much was certain, and puzzling out which disciplines he had attempted to master would have made for an interesting game had it not been for the cooling corpse that slumped over everything. Various paint pots with an equal number of differently shaped brushes; cutting tools and bits of wire, cloth, and construction paper; mortar, pestle, alembic, and low-flame burners; and, of course, the old-fashioned mechanical typewriter that squatted in the center of everything.
There was a letter there, still rolled around the platen, the last of it rendered an unintelligible mess by a jam of keys that had lodged there when the man’s face had collided with the keyboard. It opened with a pleasant enough greeting, went on almost like a daily journal entry—which perhaps had been the original intent—before growing darker. It ended with this line, which we will record as the man’s official last words:
“Do not weep for me, for I perform this final and cowardly act not out of despair… but curiosity.”
First draft: 150121
Published: 230818