Nerve paste

The funny thing was that I had picked the time and place for her death. Not that I’d foreseen her demise. It was a complete shock to me – but then why wouldn’t it have been? Everything was perfect. And I mean love-story perfect. It was eight months into our relationship and she was yet to expose any vice that I could forgive her - and she was only human. That now was all too apparent. Before she succumbed to the constriction, the agonising, retching suffocation I witnessed, she was simply angelic. I don’t apologise for any dewy-eyed nostalgia. It’s true. I won’t skimp on the bare facts as I see them. She was the one you see on the cusp of a heavenly dream, that girl you can’t look at directly, to do so would extinguish her in a wink. She was a total abstraction, too designed for life. She was flawless.


I looked on her ending with a complete sense of confusion. There is a God. And yet, there is no such thing! For how could He ever allow it? For Julia to be taken in such a way was an affront to humanity, even existence itself. To think that a whim could have killed her, a gesture of playfulness, a night-time effervescence on my part, was a constant stabbing pain at my heart. But I was not the sole culprit. I was a mere accessory, and the 'personage' of prime suspicion could not even draw breath – yet it could take it. Oh, it could so easily take it. Do I dare divulge? Can I repeat the monosyllabic slayer of sublime love, dancing heavenly adoration? A pea. It was a pea. A pea killed Julia. And a pea killed me.

She collapsed in her chair, drooping like a flower in intense heat. Her head lolled back, her neck no longer able to withstand the dead weight. The quartet stopped playing almost instantly as a woman shrieked at the table next to us. The saxophonist, he must have been a doctor, rushed from the stage like an animal toward her. Or at least he had first aid training. Where was the doctor?! My eyes darted round the restaurant, frantic for some essential solution to the horror of it all. I was motionless, half-expecting to be swept aside by some nameless authority figure, mouthing those initiatory words in the grip of a tense ritual: ‘Give me some space!’ Or some such saving phrase. Nobody moved. And I watched helpless as her skin turned a sickening colour of green. No-one would ever have thought possible that the spectrum of human complexion spanned to this extreme, yet nobody spoke in a coherence implying what we all knew unequivocally: this woman is dead. Someone help.