The Audience

He stares at the darkness deep inside the barrel of the gun. There is a look of restless resolve on his face, as his eyes search into the barrel’s blackness. The white, static image from the television screen produces a barely audible ringing which fills his ears in the surrounding silence. He squints into the barrel, trying to see past the darkness, to the brilliant flash waiting behind the strike of the revolver’s hammer. His face sags, the determination fading as he relaxes the muscles of his jaw. He looks beyond the barrel with pain and loneliness written in the lines of his weary façade.

“What happened to everybody?” he asks of no one in particular. He looks around at the four blank walls that surround him. Turning back and forth he searches for someone to care, someone to watch, any audience at all. Finding nothing, he closes his eyes, twin tears rolling down his cheeks.

In a sudden, violent motion, he throws the gun from him, leaving a dent in the drywall. There is a relative silence that follows, hindered only by his heavy breathing and the high pitch whine emitted from the depths of the television.

“I just want someone to care…” he trailed off in tears. After a moment, he cries out, louder this time, “Doesn’t anybody care?”

And then later, “Doesn’t anybody even know?”

He looks at his sole companion, the gun lying on the ground. In it he sees his failed attempts at rest, his frantic need for attention. Realizing this, he cries out all the louder, lost in the isolation of this bland room, the walls and this pistol his only audience. The constant ring of the television grows louder in its dull whine.

He walks to where he can see the screen. Staring into the shifting gray, he searches for any hint of a signal coming through the static. Zoning out in front of the television, he is momentarily safe, his thoughts of sharp, cold, cold pain and stalking loneliness fading into the back of his mind.

As he stares into the screen, a scene appears through the static. He sees an image of a man who looks like himself, the body hanging from slumped shoulders. His image frantically looking around a similar room of four blank walls. His image walks over to a dent in the wall, bends over and picks up a small, black revolver. The man looks away from the TV for an instant, locating the gun on the ground, a comforting discrepancy between himself and who he saw in the screen of the TV.

His image, head lowered, gun in hand, walks slowly to the center of the room, the center of the television screen. The man watches his image sigh heavily, releasing everything. He gazes at the screen resolutely, letting his eyes examine himself, or at least his static image.

The image quickly looks up to the man, meeting the eyes of his real twin. The man stiffens, taken aback by the look in his image’s eye. In a swift motion, the image raises the gun to his head.

There is a brilliant flash, and then his head sways to the side as brain and gristle splatter on the wall. Jagged, white bone fragments, contrast the pouring stream of blood that leaks from the hole in his head as his body slumps to the floor.

Of course, he didn’t see any of this, as the TV had turned itself off.

Now he stares into the center of the television screen, where the small white remnant of the televisions brilliance clings to the center. However, even this residual light fades, and he is left looking only at a dark reflection of himself, his only audience.