Watching him hurt. But not watching hurt more. It was a deep hurt. A hurt that she felt deep within her bones. As she sat alone on the dirty barstool, she squeezed her eyes shut and imagined him. She saw every detail of his perfectly sculpted face. He had cheekbones sharper than the edge of the grim reaper’s scythe and hair that was darker than night. The sudden clatter of glasses saved her from drowning in daydreams. She sharply breathed in the stale bar air and tried to shake the sadness that followed her like a cloud.

Her eyes darted around the dark room. She desperately tried to focus on the neon lights, the couple in the corner booth or drunken man crying next to her. But somehow her eyes always managed to circle back to him. Tonight will be different, she decided. She had been suffering from loneliness for an hour too long. With a new determination, she picked up her drink from the bar’s sticky surface and took a long sip.

Countless wanderers had been trapped at that bar. Most had wasted away and died there. She felt their ghosts as they endlessly haunted her. She needed to escape. In one final gulp she finished her drink and began her treacherous journey to the center of the dancefloor.

Once safely in the center of the pulsing crowd, she sat on the floor, closed her eyes and tried to forget. The music crept up and began to swallow her soul. She was on the verge of floating away before the sadness caught up and violently fought of the music’s advances. All the noise of the bar wasn’t enough to free her. She sat there as the sadness slowly devoured her. Tears poured from her eyes until the entire room was flooded with her sadness. The ghosts were pulling her one way and the crowd was pulling her another. She was caught in the middle of nowhere, floating in a vacuum between heaven and earth. The world had lost her her but the skies could not reach her.

He was the one to reach out and save her. He pulled her back to earth and shook out all her sadness until only a skeleton was left. The skeleton looked at him and rewarded him with a toothy smile. Still smiling, the skeleton stuck its bony hand deep within its rib cage. From where its heart should have been, the skeleton pulled out a black pistol. The skeleton pressed the cool metal of the pistol against the warm flesh of his forehead. With a final smile, the skeleton pulled the trigger.