"Do not look for meaning in your suffering."

- Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, John Gray

My boss looked at me with disapproval as the woman in front of me continued to rant about shoes. It took a particular talent to make it sound like not having a preferred brand of merchandise in size six was the actual end of the world. Still, the woman in front of me possessed that sort of talent in spades.

Kathy glanced at me in pity, mechanically putting coats back on racks from where they had been left in the dressing room. My eyes pleaded back as if to say, 'some kind of distraction? Anything? I'll owe you one.' But she simply shook her head and continued her robotic motions, determined not to get involved.

We were friends, and I would have tried to guilt her for abandoning me if she wasn't so pointedly now looking away, but in my heart, I found that I couldn't blame her for not wanting to get involved. It was a remarkably wise decision that she would never have made six months ago when she had been new and full of life and energy.

"And then, you're... 'employee' here... told me to find something else! Of all the rude things I'd never expect to hear, in her stained pants and scuffed pumps, it was so unprofessional I couldn't even."

My pants had discoloration around the cuffs, yes, but that was more a matter of design than an actual stain, and my shoes were barely used, save having had them for more than a month or so. Nevertheless, I knew by the way my manager, Kevin, was looking at me that I was in for it regardless.

"Of course, Ma'am. I'm so sorry you had to deal with that," Kevin cut in, "I'll see to it that Miss Erin here replaces both her pants and shoes at her own cost. We do have strict regulations, after all." He meant regulations on what we could buy, not that any of us could actually afford the recommended brands on our slightly over minimum wage salaries.

"And you, don't you 'Ma'am' me like some old lady!" The woman frowned, brushing her fingers through her obviously dyed blonde hair, with not insubstantial gray showing through her roots, "I have a name, I'll have you know. It's Misses Tiffany Lockheart, or Miss Lockheart, to you! And I'd ask you to use it!"

Even though this Karen over here didn't seem satisfied with the punishment Kev had just doled out, I knew I was far from off the hook. Never mind that there was maybe enough left in my account for the month to buy a six-pack of ramen and a half tank of gas.

"Of course, Ma'... Misses Lockheart, my deepest apologies..." Kevin's body hiccuped slightly with the word 'apologies,' and he stopped, confusion plain on his face.

I thought I imagined it when the first trail of blood started seeping out across his white button-up shirt. Blinking, trying to clear away the fantasy that seemed to be affecting my vision. The red stain continued to spread across the front of his shirt, and he looked down in his confusion. He held both his hands across the front of his chest as if in an attempt to hide the bright discoloration.

Tiffany looked down, and her nose pinched in disgust, taking a step away from Keven and recoiling. It was only some seconds later, when the understanding began to sink in that her eyes widened and pupils dilated.

It was the sound of thunder, beating a rhythm from behind me, that finally convinced me that it was real, that the red stain was blood and I was myself in danger. And yet, I felt my shoulders tense, my back straightening, and my body refusing to move.

Even as Tiffany's body fell, something seemed to slap against her face. It sent the loose skin surrounding her mouth quivering outward in waves, flowing from the point of impact, and something sticky and translucent, like water but far more viscous with little chunks of, seemingly, ground beef sprayed out the back of Tiffany's head and covered the counter she had been leaning on.

Her body thudding against the ground, and my innate sense of revulsion at having seen the inner contents of her head, finally shocked me enough that my body was again able to move. Slowly, carefully, I was able to turn myself around on aching feet and face the source of the thunder.

Before me, there stood a man with an M16 rifle, some hundred feet away, blocking the only exit. Rhythmically he aimed down the sights of the gun at the people trying to flee, and unflinchingly he kept pulling the trigger, "bang, bang, bang." The shots were slow and careful, two missing for every single one that hit home, but the man in front of me was cool as ice as he led his targets, gunning down our customers one by one.

Deep below the fear, I recognized a far more terrible emotion as people fell at his feet, small rivers of blood trailing away and pooling around the coat racks: relief. I felt myself passingly wonder if this meant I could maybe sit down, just for a few minutes, before the guilt came.

Shocked at my own elation, judging myself for my lack of horror, my lack of emotion even as I felt wetness soaking into my sock and up across one of my ankles, I had a brief, intrusive thought, 'God, do me next, buddy." And, almost as if he heard the voice contained wholly within my head, the man turned and pointed his weapon at me.

What I noticed then, as I stared down the barrel of his gun, was how one of his shoelaces was loose. The edges of the laces were dragging against the tile below and discoloring just the ends of the fabric. He had a bit of a belly, but it was the kind of stomach that hung just a bit over his belt when his arms and legs were thin and taunt - the way only the male body seemed able to store fat around the abdomen, holding the extra weight greedily and unwilling to share with any other part of him.

Ironically, even as I was looking at his, a strong jet of heat struck me across my own stomach. Just under my ribs, the pain seemed to radiate for a moment before dulling into what felt like a terribly cold chill. Absent-mindedly, I half wondered to myself if he had somehow made his bullets out of ice as my knees gave way, and I slid against the desk and down to the ground.

Lying there, in front of him, I looked up to meet his sad, coal-grey eyes for a moment, and I felt myself smiling in greeting the way I forced myself to smile at our customers day in and day out. Catching myself, I felt a moment of horror as I smiled absently at my would-be killer, like some sort of machine attempting to do a stupid job even as it broke apart.

And then, the realization hit that this would be the last time I had to fake a smile in front of anyone, the last day I would get reamed by my boss or have to worry about how I would pay for my next meal. These would be my final moments, dying next to a shitty supervisor and a shitty customer. But, in the end, I was able to at least pass while sitting the hell down. And with that realization, I found myself smiling again at my killer.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Where before it had been a cursory smile, a practiced, fake expression that was more reflex than expression, now my smile held only a genuine kind of relief. The shooter's eyes hesitated before moving on, and I saw him aim toward me, finger starting to squeeze lightly against the trigger before a flash of movement out the corner of his eye brought his muzzle around toward a fleeing body.

I watched as Kathy's body jerked and stumbled, a dot of red blooming from the back of her shirt, just above her waist. For half a second, I considered screaming, throwing something, trying to distract the shooter in front of me. But I was shot too, after all, and I figured she'd understand if I decided, instead, to lean to the side and try desperately to look like I was already dead.

The man's second shot took her in the back. A sickening crunch sounded, and her body shuttered like Kathy just had a sudden case of the chills. Almost translucent, red-tinged bits of bone flowered from the back of her neck. After a moment, she simply flopped down onto the ground, slapping the tile with a sloppy splash in the gore pooling beneath her.

The shooter's muzzle strafed back and forth across the store, his eyes red and pupils dilated as he sought desperately for movement. Watching for any more hiding or fleeing people from his stance covering the exit doorway.

My body cooled as I lay against the tile, blood blossoming across my shirt, through my pants, and down onto the floor. I noted absently as my socks and underwear started to bunch up from the moisture and felt something like indignation that the blood was making my death quite wet and gross.

As my body felt colder and colder, my vision began to dim. The thundering gunshots were still ringing out, and as dizziness began pulling at the corners of my eyes, I felt the steady, rhythmic beat start to become almost comforting.

It was when those gunshots seemed to stop, whether because the gunman had taken down everything that had been moving or because my senses were too cloudy to process that they were still happening. I cannot know; when there was finally silence, my life started flashing in front of my eyes.

Only, I noticed absently after some time had seemed to have passed, it wasn't my actual life that I was seeing. My vision had clouded over completely, and all I could see was an endless void. That darkness felt so natural, so cloying, that it seemed like I was falling and falling and falling. My stomach was dropping out, and I felt an unpleasant tingling deep in my hips as if I were riding the world's worst rollercoaster into the abyss.

My life, I felt reasonably sure, involved quite a bit of college. I had received a Bachelors's, followed by a Masters's Degree in Psychology. Then, as a proud graduate should have applied, and applied, and applied to job after job, all the while working the temporary customary service job I had been in since I had started studying to make ends meet. That was it - ten years of that, to be precise, until I was single and renting in my late thirties, wondering how I was going to pay for that night's dinner.

But the life I was seeing wasn't like that at all. The many lives that I was seeing. It was still me, I somehow knew, the memories still as honest and intrinsically mine as anything else I could recall, but they were likewise unfamiliar. Instead, in this one, I had been dropped on my head as a child, struggling through school and then receiving Medicaid and living with my somewhat violent father year after year after year.

Then, I remembered instead getting married to one of the duchy fratboys I had dated my sophomore year of college, spitting out child after child until I finally caught him cheating on me and tossed him to the curb. It was a messy divorce, and the side of my face would always bear the scar of where his knife had almost taken out my eye. Still, I was given a very generous settlement in both child support and alimony. I spent year after year getting older and watching my children drift away.

Dozens of different lives passed through my thoughts, spilling their tidal waves of memories into my flickering brain and then washing away. Hundreds and thousands of unhappy lifetimes played themselves out in front of me. In some, I was born a man and tried to transition, my beautiful, strong shoulders widening still further and the bones of my face mutating until I no longer recognized myself in the mirror. In others, I found some small joy or achievement - but only before life in America slowly drowned it away in medical bills or bad jobs that I could never seem to leave.

Hour after hour, year after year, seemed to pass, and still, the memories kept coming. I remember wishing that it would stop, that whatever cosmic force was forcing me to see these lives would just get bored and finally allow me to die. And it was then, in my bleakest moments, that the one happy memory, the one happy lifetime crashed into me.

At that moment, it was as though every other memory, the hundreds of thousands of years of lives that I had been forced to experience one after another, was washed away. In their place was the most incredible, most profound sense of bliss I had ever experienced.

Instead of getting my Master's Degree after undergrad, I had simply joined the military and gone out to see the world. Well, sit in a base and do paperwork, really, but even that ended up being strangely fulfilling. I had worked my way up to Sergeant in the Regiment, impressed the First Sergeant, and moved on to be NCOIC of all Schools for the small base in Virginia.

I knew, under it all, that none of those words, those ranks, and bases and people, should mean anything to me. I should be blissfully ignorant of that entire world. And yet, I remembered as though it had just happened to me yesterday: when the Colonial came into my office and told me jokes before he left for the day; how my coworker had gotten in trouble for hitting his wife. I had to bail him out of jail and let him sleep on my couch to keep him away from his family.

And, strangest of all, I remembered when I left the military after six years and picked up a Government job instead. I remembered how I put out the most desperate, most pathetic ad possible on the internet, not expecting anyone to respond. And I remembered too the man who did.

He was tall, with a belly that peeked out just a little bit over his belt, and he had the most heart-wrenchingly sad coal-grey eyes that I had ever seen in my life to that point. He drove over an hour to see me that first night, finding me shivering in front of a Starbucks as much with nerves as with the early night's cold.

We talked about things that didn't really matter and yet mattered more than anything else in the world. Because they were our hobbies and those were the things that we cared about, really. I listened as the man described to me the plot of an old nineties animated movie with interest. In turn, he listened to me ramble about unicorns and cookie recipes for just as long.

A first night turned into a second, and weeks turned into months. He still didn't really know what I did in the military or if I had any siblings. I still couldn't quite remember where it was that he worked or what his parents' names were, but none of those things seemed to matter.

Eventually, we got married, and still, he never pressured me for more than I was willing to give. My ad had asked, had begged really, for someone, man or woman, who would be ready so simply come and cuddle me. Nothing physical, nothing that you could find on Tender or whatnot, where someone came over, had an orgasm, and then left forever. But just someone willing to come to me and hold me at night, tell me that he wouldn't leave if I wasn't ready for him to go and that things were going to be ok. And our marriage was somehow, impossibly, likewise almost a celibate existence. But every night, he would come to me before I drifted off to sleep, he would still hold me, and he would tell me that everything was going to be ok.

The memories, like all the rest, faded all too quickly, and, unlike with every life before, I clung to them. I wrapped my sense of self around those happy moments that had never happened, and I refused to let them go even as they tried to tear away, buried under another sea of unimaginable tragedy.

Even as they echoed across my brain, imprinting themselves more fully into my most fundamental memories, even as the realization hit me where it was that I had known those sad, steel-grey eyes. Even then, I only hung on to those memories all the more.

I could not hear the words, but even still, I whispered into the void his name, "Milton. Milton Bonnswell." And I vowed that I would never let myself forget what could have almost never been.