Falling Down

It was dark, dank.

There was a pipe dripping somewhere over head, the constant drip, splash, drip, splash, interrupted only by the occasional bang, thud.

I stared wide eyed at my supposed boyfriend as another body slumped backwards off of their chair, a pool of blood oozing out quickly in a sticky horror like puddle.

It was just me and him now, in the dim light of the single hanging light bulb.

“Do you trust me, Frankie?” He’d asked earlier that day, maybe less than a couple of hours ago, eyes bright with excitement. I’d nodded in a heartbeat; we’d been together three years and he’d never given me a reason not to trust him.

He’d grinned, that big happy smile which had made me fall in love with him in the first place. He told me to follow him, and I hesitated.

His previous question had thrown me off track a little.

“C’mon Frankie, it’ll be fun, I promise.”

So I’d followed him into the basement of a house that belonged to someone that I didn’t know. There were six other men sitting around a circular table and I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t care to ask for their names, either, not when I could see the dirty metal of a gun placed directly in the centre of the table.

Gerard sat down and picked up the device, stroking it between his long pale fingers. “Take a seat, Frankie.” He said not taking his eyes off of the gun.

I shouldn’t have hesitated.

I should have turned and run and gotten help for my all of a sudden nutcase boyfriend, but I didn’t.

Instead, I stared helplessly at him, only doing what he’d asked me too when he looked up at me with his soft caramel eyes and said, “You told me you trusted me, baby.”

His face lit up when he heard the scraping of the chair across the floor as I pulled it out, and then the creaking noise it made when I sat in it.

I cautiously eyed the bullets strewn across the table, my insides shivering when I counted them. Seven of them.

There were eight of us in the room.

“Gee.” I chocked, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say after that, so I stopped talking, drawing my mouth into a thin line. I flinched when someone roughly took the gun from Gerards hand, and pushed a bullet into the slot, spinning the cylinder and clicking it shut.

I didn’t know the technical terms for guns, but I knew what they did, and I knew this wouldn’t end well.

“Gentlemen,” the burly man with the gun said, pressing it to his forehead and grinning. “Let the games begin.”

He’d gotten lucky that time. It was the third man to push the gun into his mouth and pull the trigger who found the bullet. It was lodged in the back of his throat now. I think he died slowly, because I could still hear his chocking sobs long after he pulled the trigger.

I needed to be sick.

Having a gun barrel pushed to your head by the one you love, because you’re shaking too much to hold the trigger isn’t something I imagined would happen this morning when I sat with Gerard in our bed, feeding each other toast and getting crumbs all over the sheets.

Yet the game continued, back and forth, bodies falling, until it was just Gerard and I.

He picked the gun out of the hand of the newly deceased and examined the final bullet closely.

“Good luck, baby.” He said fondly. I could see love, devotion in his eyes. I chocked out another sob.

“Gerard. Stop this!” I cried, watching him push the bullet into the slot, and spinning the cylinder. “What the fuck are you doing?”

We could have stopped; we could have left the basement, and I’d have erased this from my memory. It would be a blip or a bad dream.

“I love you.” Gerard said, and I knew he’d meant it. I could hear the truth in his voice. It was so sincere, so honest, I just couldn’t appreciate it when he had a gun barrel pressed against his forehead.

He winked at me and grinned, then pulled the trigger.