Sam was not a strong man and he knew it. He wiped his eyes of the unclear gaze and worked hard to decipher the words written by his brother while he cried. His wrist shook as he read the wrinkled letter. Then he stood and walked, his chest puffed-out; arm muscles tightened. Sam was a mature man by his confident stride as he went to the kitchen. Inside the silverware drawer, he grabbed the gun and pointed it, directly at his temple. Sam’s shoulders trembled one last sob for his brother Shannon, “why’d you go Shan, I need you here. I wanted you here….” Sam placed the gun on target- and pulled the trigger. His body loosen, a puppet cut from its captor, he crumbled to the floor, the gun beside him. Sam’s last facial expression in life- a frame-worthy stunned. The garbage bags by the kitchen door- the last thing he ever saw.

The letter, wrinkled beyond it’s once factory perfection, propelled by Sam’s hand, floated, as if by faint, to the floor. It turned on its side, and then the letter landed. Its contents right side up and well placed, next to: Sam’s sad eyes, Sam’s sad existence, Sam’s sad ending. It read

Sammy,

This has been a very short Friday. I’ve spent most of it writing this note to you, and the other most of it, folding it and gathering the necessary means to mail it to you including finding a mailbox. Yet I have done it. But if I decided to change my mind (I won’t) I know it would seem odd to you to have received it. But I sent it, immediately, nonetheless. I love you Sam and I will miss you and hope forever that you will understand. All kinds of things happened that I neither saw nor heard as I recall it, but I am the one who killed Mark in the artist’s studio. I won’t deceive you (I would never deceive about this) in your quest to continue your life beyond this letter. But I am the one who stabbed Mark and if I stay I live in that thick mire, quick sand, for succumbing to the devil as I did. I have left to be in Berlin, a short while, straightaway I will see myself, with a gun, to my own end. If I was to stay in New York, and I told you about Mark, you wouldn’t believe me. Then we would stop believing it ourselves and what next? Everything will seem a fairy tale and that is the deception I would not let you, or me, live. I mean if we lived in such disbelief, what other disbeliefs would follow, not believing in God. I love you too dearly to allow either of us to live like that,

I must go.

Shannon

Their Deeds Unmistakable, Part II – Tomorrow!