Somewhere, out there, someone was opening a window. In another part of the world, thousands of miles from here, it was morning. The birds were greeting the sun, and a day full of promise — both for joy and sorrow, incidents filling the spectrum of possibility beyond the mind's stammering comprehension — began anew. Life was persistently growing and moving on; a process bringing fulfilment to every notion entertained since consciousness first formed in the dark corners of some primitive mind. The stars in space shone just as brightly, giving no regard to any of these things, as time flowed achingly through every particle of matter in the universe. Somewhere, it was all still happening.
And yet here it was. In front of me, flickering like an old film clip, this sequence of which I was a part of only in observation; in this often fuzzy and dimming chasm of perception, an alpha wave stream acting as a carrier current for the signal static of my senses, I was bearing full witness to this display which threw my normal neurological meter readings deep into the red — right off the end of the scale. There was no way this could be happening (not in the realm of sane possibility, I believed). No way. Not to me. Not in front of me. Not for real.
The explosion of the shot tore through the air, sending every sinuous fiber of my being a wake-up call. Like the startled wonder of being yanked from sleep into the realization that you are late for work, my head swivelled in the aftermath of his body suddenly jerking backwards. Involuntarily abandoning my peripheral perspective for an immediate one, his eyes fixed on mine as gravity wrenched his body to the earth in an expression of amazed disbelief and confusion; reality was throwing ice water in his face. My jaw fell along with his head, each to their lowest point of descent — open and to the the pavement. The audible events following this moment washed out of the drainhole of my awareness as I looked on at his injured motions, tightening and loosening in varying degrees, as his focus on me fell off into the cloudless sky as his lids drew closed. Blood began to escape from the freshly torn opening in his body, forming a broadening puddle that encircled his form on the sidewalk.
In time, I would feel like a salty black gumbo of incensed sorrow, guilt, shock and horror... a voodoo spell conjuring in me an emotional biopsy. At that moment, however, I felt nothing at all... numb, like the pricking of the starlight in the midnight sky. Somewhere mingled among the dark blood that now ran off the curb flowed his beautiful, feral life. And this exceptional human being, so full of living quintessence seconds before, lay dying at my feet.