Her Poetic Passing #5 in Kill Series

She arrived for the candid photo shoot as scheduled, and looked through the trees with questions in her eyes.    
 
There would be something poetic and aesthetically pleasing about her final moments. Like a deer in season, her eyes turned toward distant movements she didn’t understand. I could see in her face that she recognized a threat. Her eyes narrowed, and her jaw clenched in determination to find the source of danger.  
   
While studying her face, I paused to marvel at the miracle of human thought. She was beautiful and electric as her mind danced frantically in its search to enrich and extend her life. I imagined her making similar facial expressions with her lover, desiring what was but searching desperately for what might be.    
   
I scanned her form, beautiful and balanced, and imagined the pleasures she had shared as lover, wife, and mother. Yes, the human mind is a miraculous thing, able to conjure and solve, able to love and hate, able to plan a future and reflect on the past. I wondered what thoughts raced in her mind.    
   
My finger squeezed gently. I stayed focused on her eyes even as the kick and boom broke the still air between us. Her eyes, clear and brown, looked toward me as if they had their answer in the flash that signaled my presence. In three-tenths of a second, my bullet found its home, piercing her sternum and expanding to wreak havoc within her earthly temple. I knew that at that cruel instant, her chest cavity exploded in disarray as vital parts that had functioned with beauty and balance for three decades succumbed to a single foreign object the size of her smallest finger.    
   
She stumbled back, stunned for a moment. Her eye brows wrinkled as if disappointed that she’d not solved the puzzle sooner.  After a silent moment still standing, she folded clumsily to the ground. As she struck the earth, a final breath crossed her vocal chords to produce a short high-pitched grunt.    
   
It is striking that something so beautiful and functioning at such high levels one second might be reduced to its basest elements and cease so entirely in the next. The lips that kissed and formed words of affection for so many were quiet. The tongue that tasted the saltiness of lovers and unimaginable pleasures was still.    
   
I felt the euphoria that hunters feel after a kill and whispered, “All has perished,” as I looked at the folded human frame in the distance. What had been only moments before was no longer. Yes, if we look closely, there is something beautiful and poetic to be seen in final moments.