The Between Molecules, Then Atoms: Could This be the End?
(a short story)
by Kathy Fowler

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Nothing happened for quite a while until, as if he had x-ray vision or some of those night vision goggles he'd seen in the movies, he could see through the thin lids of his eyes, through the veins and pink, though there wasn't any light.  What he saw was his chest, in close-up focus, and nothing else, as if the sight chose to reveal itself to him, and his eyes weren't responsible for the view.  Indeed, he couldn't look away from the sight if he wanted to.  The hair appeared gargantuan.  Theo began to worry.

If there were this much blood on a few chest hairs, he worried about how much blood was seeping, or maybe even gushing, onto the Oriental rug that his mother had given him.  He hadn't thought about the blood.  Another thing that had slipped his mind:  his body was going to expel substances onto the carpet.  Instead of the mess, he'd focused on the velocity of his death and how he would look in rigor mortis.

At least, he'd gotten rid of the most offensive part of himself, the part upon which he fixated, his nose.  Besides his nose, he was proud of his body, which was perfect.  He spent most of the school day making sure of that.  He'd been teaching science long enough that he could manage a lot of weightlifting in the school gym when he wasn't grading lab exercises and sleepwalking through class lectures.  When they came to take the morgue photographs or when his mother arranged his funeral, he would not be immortalized with the nose he'd despised since childhood--only the body he so carefully conserved.  Theo's face was too small for such a nose, inherited from his Greek father, arching and prominent and filled with wiry hairs that he'd meticulously remove every morning.

He worried that the destruction of his nose may have exposed hair that had been hidden.

He couldn't feel anything but his mind racing; he was a disembodied brain floating in a black box with one hole exposing one picture:  A nest of sticky matted disgusting offensive body hair.

He wondered if the police would think he hadn't committed the deed--he hadn't left a note.  The gun had probably fallen to the floor.  The police would be forced to take DNA samples, and they would of course discover DNA all over the bedroom from the wild sex he'd had with Rita only hours before he purchased the gun and rushed to put the barrel to his nose.  DNA was as rampant as the germs he worried about on seat cushions in movie theaters and on bathroom doorknobs.

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