A girl in Delhi has a brilliant mind and secrets darker than the nights that won't let her eyes close.
She lives in the Labyrinth, a place that always seems dim, even in the middle of the day. There, customers flock in their dozens, and there, th...
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A mustard field is where he drives her. She suspects she has visited it in dreams. The green speckled with yellow. So vibrant, so similar to her image of heaven that for all she knows she might already be dead.
He spins the cylinder of his revolver, clinks four shells inside, more than he'll probably need.
His truck quakes softly, the engine still rumbling.
"Get out," he says.
Her lips tighten to a hard line. "So you can drive off and leave me here?"
"Sure, that's it."
"You haven't taken the key out of the ignition, so you must be indecisive about killing me."
He takes the key out of the ignition.
"Awesome." Her lips untighten. "There goes that."
He studies the rearview mirror like a shard of a crystal ball framed in plastic.
"Out. Now."
She cracks open the passenger door. "Will it hurt?"
"What?"
"The bullet."
"I'll shoot you somewhere where it won't."
"So I'll die before I feel anything?"
"Exactly."
"How many seconds before?"
He brings his head down against the steering wheel. "Shut up."
Her toes tingle on the gravel as she slides out of his truck. He nods, as if her actions are a sentence he agrees with, and stiffly he exits his own side of the vehicle.
"Start walking into the field," he mutters.
The gravel succumbs to a moist and spongy loam under her shuffling feet, and the mustard plants tickle her as she submerges herself in them, wading as though in water. She flinches when she hears his gun cock behind her. His boots thud slowly, matching her cautious strides.
"Are you going to think about me after?" She plucks a yellow flower as she walks.
"No," he says.
"I doubt that." She raises the flower to her nose, and it smells similar to the clovers her mother used to grow.
He scoffs. "You don't know me, kid."
"I know that you care," she says, "even though you don't want to."
"I couldn't give two shits about you, kid."
"Are you leveling the gun at my head?"
"How did you know?"
An orange pus of a dawn seeps up from the horizon. She stops in her tracks and traces its skeins of light with her pinky. "We've gone fifty steps from your truck, well, you thirty because you're bigger than me. You snapped the safety of your gun on and off three times between then and now. You've sighed five times and—"
