He felt the warm blood rolling down his chest. It was kind of funny, he had always pictured this moment as a sweet release of slowly succumbing to death, but that was not the way it truly was. Instead, his whole body hurt, every inch of it. Not just the gunshot wound, but his arms, legs, hands, and feet. His fingers, which had at first begun to tingle, were growing more numb by the minute. The pain is excruciating, he thought interestedly.

As his vision began to grow dimmer, and his breaths shorter, the man only wanted to look upon his killer's face. He wanted to see if there was any regret, remorse, pain, happiness, or satisfaction in those cold eyes. As he slowly lifted himself up the best he could, he looked into the killer's wild eyes and let out a scream of pure horror. “It was you!” He screamed. “It was you all along!”

The man's head dropped back onto the cold floor beneath him, and he closed his eyes in anguish. How...how...how? He thought desperately. He tried to remember what had led up to this fatal moment. It all came swirling back in bright flashes. Walking through the front door. Putting the car keys on the hook beside the door. He had gone into the kitchen to get a drink of water. Ah, water. What a sweet blessing that would be right now to his parched mouth. After setting his glass upon the granite counter, he had walked into the bedroom and stared into the mirror beside the bed. That was as far back as his memory would allow him to go. After that, everything was black. Sort of how he pictured death to be. Black. Cold. Lonely.

To the man it felt like hours had passed since he had heard the sound of the gun firing, but in reality it had only been seconds. The pain was starting to fade now, which was good. But wait, no, it wasn't good. Didn't that mean he was dying? Didn't that mean he would soon disappear from the world of life? He could hear death calling him. A soft whisper. A longing sigh. He would go towards it shortly, but first he had to know why. He asked his killer this most important question in the feeblest of voices, and the killer only laughed. “Haven't you figured out by now who I am? Don't you remember why this happened?” The voice said mockingly, almost as if it were coming from his own mouth.
The man struggled one last time to remember the preceding events. He thought back further, even before walking in through the front door.

There had been a car accident. Not his, no, not his. Who was it? It hit him then, harder even than the bullet. His wife and son had been in that accident. He had been waiting in the hospital for the doctor to come tell him that they were okay. But they hadn't been, he recalled. They had died in that accident and he was now alone. He had gotten woodenly into his car, pulled into his driveway, walked through the front door. Then came the glass of water from the kitchen and walking into the bedroom. He could now remember staring into the mirror, into the cold merciless eyes of his killer, and watching the right hand with the gun slowly rise. The muzzle had rested softly against his chest, almost lovingly, until BOOM. He had hit the floor. He had remembered everything. He had died.