The difference between motive and intent 1. The bullet can be said to have a life, no matter how brief, because it has action and purpose, and is carbon based. This action is predetermined, as is the purpose but that fault's not the bullet's grief. What joy it must experience, screaming through the air at a speed supersonic, its birth in a chemical burst. Knowing its object's to pierce, the bullet's not subject to feelings of doubt about the meaning of life. 2. A woman has a life of indeterminancy. Who will she marry? Who will provide for her children? What man can accomplish those tasks, and still inspire -- what exactly? Love, lust, contentment? A backyard pool, new hardwood floors, a kitchen to die for? And who will befriend her? Everyone's so much older, such middle aged frumps, gossipy slick with hateful looks at her youth, the true blonde of her hair, her naivete so earnestly exaggerated, hoping for some sort of acceptance, even as the secret butt of their jokes. Even that unpleasantness, she willingly once sought. 3. The knife remains inert, merely a tool, someone's device. It is a slave to another's will, an instrument. It's life has no independence, however brief, however futile. Perhaps that is for the best for knives are dangerous, even when useful, even at rest. They have this potential for any evil thought to make itself manifest in actions unspeakable, and cruelly beautiful. 4. The bullet dies when it hits the intended object, movement denied further advancement. Once sleek, it now is only a lump or worse, fragments. Death's instantaneous and the bullet may never know it has, or has not, accomplished its purpose. That is its fate, a rush of wind, a whiff of cordite and then oblivion upon achieving success or failing in its reach. Not knowing, it is free from despair. There is a purity to this, a life lived in pursuit of great things, outside morality, the decisive moment long past. 4. Outside on the porch in the evening light, behind her fence she smoked cigarettes. Her hands shook. Why did she start? Answers are incomplete. Stress, the loss of opportunities at work, money ill-spent, the tears of her children as she left them each morning to the indifference of strangers repeating their mantras: It ends as soon as you drive off. Trust us about that. She felt that loss, and smoke, at least for an instant she could keep, hold close, assure herself that it's truly all right, this life. Hand to mouth. Flick ash. Repeat. 5. The bullet's death isn't open to view, not the reality as it occurs. The film maker, with his bag of tricks can furnish a simulacrum of the event: the liver smashed, the green bile flowing out from a punctured duct, the thick purple blood as it's pumped from a vena cava well torn by the lead's tumbling path. He may even show you it's final resting place in the small of the back behind the heart, but it isn't the truth, the real beauty of its death, all shape lost, trapped in an animal's juice. He must obey the conventions as his genre instructs. He must show us the look on her face before this scene can be left for the next. The one with the cops and their tape, and a van with reporters, cameras, a satellite dish. 6. The knife has no experience of death. In the right hand it may strike, again and again, in and out of a man's sight or that of anyone else, a small boy child perhaps waking up to see the strange act. The arm, the hand, the steel blade, shiny and dark. The red color, in it's rhythm, appearing like paint. What is this? he must think. He didn't know a knife could do that. 7. The epilogue is still to be written out. The bullet is spent, the woman's life is at peace, but the knife still exists, and the hand that once used it. All the unknowns, the mysterious reasons, the complex emotions, belong to a future that must go on living without either of them in the picture. There's more of the tale to be told, and more that can't ever enter the tale. This is only a starting point for whatever comes after.