The Shame Conclusion

(WARNING: Contains mild descriptions of gore and suicidal violence, Italian obscenities, and references to alcoholism)

Brio Deiorio sat stone-faced in the hardbacked, poorly-balanced chair, staring with unfocused eyes at his wife’s coffin and wishing he was numb.

He was halfway numb—externally so. He could hear the grim pitch of the speaker’s voice going on, saying individual, abstract, scrambled words. The smell of the place was nauseating. So, cloyingly, artificially sweet from the flowers and air fresheners that it only made the presence of a corpse more noticeable. He could feel the way his chair shook from his son incessantly bouncing his knee next to him, also silent and expressionless, grey. In a weird way, it made Brio want to throw something, and, at the same time, couldn’t bother him much.

His brain was throbbing away in sync with his heart. He didn’t want to keep rehearsing the event. It was already embedded in his head, soldered onto the backs of his eyelids. He hadn’t slept since it had happened because he couldn’t stop seeing it.

Least of what he deserved.

As much as he struggled not to think it through again, it played on against his will, on repeat.

Brio bolted upright in bed, yanked out of sleep by the deafening roar of a gun going off next to him. His pajama shirt had blood spattered on it. He had only half of a second to recognize that he wasn't the one who'd been shot before he saw.

Sick horror and a foreignly potent dread wrenched at his gut.

He heard himself cuss, voice quickly rising from a regular shout to a scream while he lurched instinctively toward her body, flipping to his knees on the already crimson-stained mattress, hands quickly becoming coated in blood just from touching her head.

“Amelie!" he shrieked worthlessly. She was dead. He could tell that already, no problem. She was stretched out partially on her side of the bed, head slightly tilted to the side, one leg hanging off the side of the mattress. His Staccato P4 was still in her left hand. Her throat---she'd shot herself in the throat. There was a bullet hole there, pulsing blood in nearly-projectile amounts that made him taste bile. He’d seen death before plenty of times, it being an unfortunate part of the business, but this was different.

"Oh, cazzo!" he yelled even louder. His head throbbed, and he felt like he was going to throw up. What could he do? There was nothing he could do, was there? She was already dead. She'd aimed at the prime spot, no chance for survival from that point.

Even though he knew full well there would be no bringing her back, a rubbery kind of shock encased the thought and prevented it from reaching his body. His hands flew over her in vain.

"Oh, mi Dio, oh, mi Dio---" he heard himself saying over and over again involuntarily.

Painfully helpless rage and a miserable regret made his skin hurt. He tried to pull himself together, but his heart was pounding harder than it had in years.

Why had she done this? Why shoot herself? Why not him? If she'd gotten to the gun somehow, she'd worked to, and he was asleep, so he was a sitting duck. She could have shot him, she should have shot him if she was going to kill someone.

"Che cazzo!" he screamed again. He had trouble moving away from her, but, at the same time, he couldn't bear to look at her body any longer. He had to get away from it just for a few seconds, or he'd be sick. He threw himself off the bed and toward the door, yanking it open. He had to get something, do something. He didn't know what he was hoping to do, though, and he had to stop just outside of the door and lean against the staircase railing. His knees were about to give out. His mind wouldn't settle. It just flew from one grim fact to another until it was a circuitous storm that he couldn't get through, terrifying him for some reason and making him more and more angry as it went.

He felt his throat rasp; he was still cursing. He couldn't make it stop. He didn't know how to, since he had never really decided to start in the first place. It was like a whole separate being was controlling his voice now. He covered his mouth to hold back the rise of more bile, unsure what else to do, starting to shake. He dragged his hand through his hair, forgetting that it was soaked in her blood, and that meant the blood was in his hair now like some kind of grisly, macabre dye. He'd have to clean it up.

He should get towels, at least start drying up the blood. That was what he should get. He had to start cleaning it up. Maybe starting to make it cleaner would help him to be able to think about what to do next. His eyes burned, and his voice broke. He tried to strangle it, but it didn't work because he kept cursing, and the tears were infecting the sound.

He barreled down the hallway to the linen closet and yanked the cabinet door open to snatch up some of the towels there. He'd need a lot. All of them, why not? There was so much blood…

"Papà, what happened?" Giustiniano's thick, dread-filled voice broke in over the screaming in Brio's head, not stifling it, just adding to the chaos.

"Go to your room!" Brio ordered him. He didn't have the patience or the presence of mind to deal with the boy's nonsense now, too.

"But, Papà, what happened? Is Mamma---?" the boy pushed instead of obeying him. Brio spun on his heel, ready to choke him and also too appalled to do anything.

"She just shot herself!" he shouted at him, not waiting to see the understanding register in his son's face. "Go to your room!" he repeated. He turned back to the closet to drag out more towels, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that Giustiniano stopped after taking only two steps back. His face was ashen. What the hell was going on, couldn't Brio control anything right now? Why wasn't Giustiniano obeying him?

“Do what I say!" he roared at the little brat, shoving him into his room to make him go like he'd been told. Giustiniano tripped and fell to the ground, and he covered his head with both arms like he thought Brio would hit him or something. Brio turned back toward his room, but he saw that Cielo—his nephew—was gaping at him from the doorway of his own room like Brio was some kind of demon from Hell. What, was he all horrified by Brio pushing Giustiniano? Did he think Brio had done the shooting or something?

"What are you looking at?" Brio demanded. He heard how guttural and threatening he sounded, and he didn't mean to come off so scary, but he couldn't get through the pain in his head to try to fix it.

Cielo retreated, looking away and shaking his head. "Nothing, sir," he said in a thin, frightened voice. Brio didn't have the time or the energy to fiddle with that. He had to get back to Amelie.

He charged back down the hall with the armful of towels. "God, what am I supposed to do with this?" He cursed repeatedly under his breath, attacking the blood on the bed with some of the towels right away. He threw one over Amelie's head, unable to stomach looking at the gruesome mess there any longer.

"Oh, God, she's dead, she's dead!" His voice was cracking even more now, and he couldn't stop the sounds from turning into sobs. "Oh, God, oh, God, Amelie, why? Why you, if I---God!" he coughed desperately, trying to stop up what was left coming from the wound. All of her very life, just gushing out onto the bed. Tears burned down his face while they landed on the bed and on her. He tried to scrape them away, but he saw the streaks mixing with the blood on his hands and realized that was only getting the blood on his face, not stopping the loathsome tears.

Why did he have to make her so miserable she killed herself? Herself, not him? Why didn't she murder him for hurting her and the kids so much, if it was making her this desperate? Now he couldn't fix it, fix things with her.

"Why, Amelie, why? Oh, God!” He felt like his throat was closing. He turned around and ran to the bathroom just in time to puke into the toilet. He spat a few times, flushed the toilet, and then had to lie down on the cold floor to let his head settle. He was starting to feel dizzy and faint.

The pain raged in his throat from the tears. He stopped fighting them, seeing no need to anymore. At least not for now, when nobody could see him. He buried his face in his arms to muffle them so no one else would hear them through the walls, but then he gave way to the vicious sobs that shook his whole body with a chest-rattling ferocity.

He blinked hard in real time, momentarily back at the funeral. He despised the overpowering floral smell, but he tried to focus on it to keep his mind busy. He didn’t know how much longer he could bear the cycling memory.

It was his fault. He hadn't pulled the trigger, but he'd practically been the bullet. He’d been so abusive and selfish and careless in every way, she’d had no other choice to escape. He’d never thought she would go to suicide, but he gave her no other option. Throughout the past years, he’d deliberately manipulated her lack of cleverness, her feelings of spiritual obligation, even though he, himself, had felt no such obligation at the time. Except for his promise to God to treat everyone around him more kindly, a promise that still weighed heavy on him as one that was totally unfulfilled. Maybe this whole mess was punishment for that character failing, as well.

More cold shame rushed through his veins. God wasn’t to blame for this, even Brio knew, as much as he wished God was. He couldn’t logically decide God was too distant to interfere in his life for good and then also decide that God had been close enough to interfere for bad. This was just the sting of natural consequences burning him alive for what he’d done.

This is all my fault, he thought, unable to avoid the strangling guilt. He could practically hear the words in every one of his ear-throbbing heartbeats. Weird how emotion did that sometimes, putting senses where they didn’t belong. Maybe that was God, though; slamming the shame into every one of Brio’s five senses so he would finally wake up and stop being such a monster.

This-is-all-my-fault, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump, this-is-all-my-fault, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

He reached up and squeezed his pulsing temples between his hands, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. This had to be the final straw. He had to be a better person. Or at least not a monster. He had to stop being a monster. He didn’t know how he could stop being what he was, but he had to figure it out somehow. This couldn’t be for nothing just like every other painful experience in Brio’s life had been.

He scoffed lowly at himself. Could he believe himself? He could practically hear himself even when he wasn’t talking out loud. What point did he think God might have in store this time? There had been nothing before, so what fabulous new move would appear now to break the mould? God was either in or out, and all of Brio’s experiences had shown the answer to be out. So, what did Brio have to fight for? What chance did he stand when he was already that hopeless? It was too late. Had been for years.

He squeezed his head again. Maybe he should just kill himself, too. That could be a way to end the monster in him, the monster he was.

But he was just too much of a believer to want to risk that. Stupid belief. Never enough to help, always too much to be at ease.

Bitterness was named appropriately; it tasted sour and acidic and miserable. The only thing that would wash that taste away for a time was alcohol, and a lot of it. He’d look forward to that as soon as this was over. Something to distract himself from…everything.

So, he decided he’d drown it away and think about it some other time, if ever again; the same conclusion he always came to. He did recognize abstractly that that meant insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Still, it was the way he understood, and the only way that didn’t require plunging into an ever-widening question mark and leaning on a Power which he didn’t trust to be there to catch him. Besides, it was familiar, which meant he could navigate it with experience and relative comfort. Better than nothing. Better than wallowing in something he didn’t know how to change.

Brio sat back upright and resumed his initial position, trying to focus on the vile-smelling flowers and be fully numb while his mind took off on another lap.