Late night thoughts

Here’s a quickie/first draft, based on a writing exercise developed by Lynne Procope.

HOME ON LEAVE

It can best be described
this way:
the moment I knew everything
would be different forever was when the whoosh-snap
of the rifle’s report dissolved
into a fastball’s thud of pain in my chest,
and I realized that the sound of it and the feeling of it
were one and the same, and that
the only way I knew any of it was real
was after it had happened –
there was no sound while it was happening,
and the only way I knew the sound had been there
was by its immediate absence as I fell back. All that –
and of course
this too: my target
fell without making a sound of his own,
and he did not get up again.