Eight Minutes, Shirt Still On

Through the wall, I can feel it more than hear it — her alarm clock, already counting, already patient in a way I am not. Eight minutes. Maybe seven now. I have stopped looking at my phone.

The grey light through the curtain is the specific grey of Bengaluru in June before the rain decides to arrive — flat, close, the air already thick at six-forty in the morning. I am sitting half-upright against the headboard with my work shirt open from the third button down, and the cotton is sticking faintly at the small of my back, and none of that matters because the bullet is already running. I pressed it on before I fully decided to. That is the honest version.

It sits against the inside of my left thigh, held there by the fabric pulled taut where my knee is hooked over the edge of the mattress. That angle — the knee out, the hip open just enough — was a decision I made without calling it one. My right leg is still straight. My right hand is flat on the sheet beside me, fingers closed.

My left hand holds the small remote, and I have not moved the setting from the lowest because I am trying to be strategic about this, because I am a person who is strategic, because I have seven minutes and I am not wasting a single one of them on being reckless too soon. The buzz transfers through the fabric and I feel it in the crease where my thigh meets my hip before I feel it anywhere else — a peripheral shimmer, arriving before I give it permission. I breathe in. The exhale takes longer than I mean it to, unfolding slowly into the close morning air, and I stop it before it becomes a sound.

The wall is thin. I know exactly how thin because I have heard her on the phone, have heard the particular way she laughs at something before she realises how loud she is. She does not know the same things about me. I intend to keep it that way.

My shirt collar is still buttoned. I am aware of this in the way you become aware of something unnecessary — the formality of it, the suggestion that part of me is still dressed for an office that does not open for two hours. Below the third button: nothing resolved. The shirt hangs.

The fabric at my hip is light enough that the warmth coming off my own skin has already moved through it. I have been warm since I woke up. The warmth was there before the bullet. I am being precise about this because it matters — the bullet found something already waiting.

Through the wall, a small sound. She is turning over. Not waking, just shifting. The clock is still counting.

My left knee stays where it is, the cotton pulled tight across the inside of my thigh, the buzz sitting exactly where I left it. I move the remote one setting up. The sound I make is less than a sound — it cuts off somewhere below my throat, held there, kept. My knee does not move.