What was it you’d said to him that twilit day? You'd kill for his smile. That’s a clever sentence; it does not have an object. Kill your teacher? Kill your best friend? Your family member? Oh, don’t start that again; killing yourself is the easiest thing you can do. Your father would agree; eight years old, and you had already made your first suicide threat: “Give me a life-size teddy or I will jump out of the window.” The next day, you cradled in your tiny, sky-white arms, a gift; a gift daddy assumed you wanted so badly, you preferred death over its absence. What he never understood, all the way until those oncologists diagnosed him to his pyre, was that you’d only received one end of a win-win rope. Kill or cradle. Cradle or jump. Both were gifts. One required a wallet; the other needed a window. One was from daddy to daughter; the other, from daughter to daddy. One felt good to touch, the other would be bliss to feel.

Killing someone else for him would be interesting now. Suicidal Woman Shoots Clueless Guy, Wins Smile From Nonnimus Boyfriend, Shoots Him. I can almost hear the media turnovers exploding.