the soluntion of violence

This is how I do it.

 He might have sensed Anna standing behind him because he leaned over and reached for the weapon on the floor. More a sword than a knife, it was two feet long, a third of that, the leather-wrapped handle. The double-edged blade was glazed with blood. It looked heavy, cumbersome, and crude. She watched a fat drop of Maryann’s blood fall from his hand to splash brightly on the pale rag rug above the tip of the blade, like the dot of an “i”. His bloodstained hand was floating down to the knife when her hand slipped into the shadow of his and took it the way the gulls at the beach steal a sandwich even as you lift it to your mouth.

His hand closed on nothing, and she heard a sub-aural grunt as he looked down to where the knife had been. Anna placed one knee on the bed and gripped the weapon like a Louisville slugger. Left-handed, like the great Ted Williams, she swung for the fences, her fluid follow-through ending in a bone-jarring stop as the tip of the blade bit deep into the plaster wall and stuck there. 

Severed just above a prominent Adam’s apple, Dmitri’s head bounced off the wall and landed face up, encircled in the crook of Maryann’s arm, her fingers clawed deep into her pillow in death. Anna watched his face as he seemed to watch his own headless body rise to its knees, stall like a stunt plane at the top of a too-steep loop, and topple off the bed heavily. The mouth went slack, and the blue eyes drifted to a point over her shoulder and stayed open. 

Anna caught a flicker of movement beyond the window on the fire escape. The inside of the window had a rime of melting frost. What she had first thought was a pale face, was only her own reflection. It wasn’t fair, his lack of suffering.

experpt from Prophets Tango, Season One. Out of Step