Erik brought the paper. His hands were shaking, lips pressed into a line he couldn’t keep steady. He didn’t speak. Just offered it to me like an executioner’s blade.
I knew before I read it.
The ink screamed it anyway.
BILLY THE KID SHOT DEAD!
I couldn’t breathe. The world narrowed to black letters on cheap paper. I saw the words. I saw his name. I saw it wasn’t his name. Not really. Henry. Henry. Henry.
I clutched the newsprint like it could bleed him back into existence, but it was just pulp and ink and lies.
I folded. My knees didn’t ask permission. My lungs crumpled like I’d taken the bullet instead. My whole body folded in on itself, trying to make the pain smaller. It didn’t work.
He was gone.
The boy who made me stay. The boy who made me want. The boy who built me a dream house in the dirt and filled it with laughter. Gone.
Shot in the dark. Alone. Without me.
The paper hit the ground and I followed. The marketplace blurred. Sounds fled. My hearing turned inside out. I felt the blood in my ears and nothing else.
He had a smile like springtime after famine. And now he was dead.
I crawled inside myself and tried not to scream.
My fingers shook so hard I tore the seam of my journal trying to open it. Not to write. Just to touch something that had once held him. That had held us.
But the words mocked me. The ink stared back like it knew.
Billy the Kid is dead.
Henry is dead.
Henry is dead.
Henry is dead.
I wrote it again and again until the letters stopped looking like language. Until my hand seized. Until I didn’t know if I was writing or just tearing the page with my nails.
I screamed into the book. Into the spine. Into the silence.
I ripped out a page. It didn’t help.
I slammed it shut. Still there.
I flung it across the room. Still there.
I punched the wall. My knuckles split. My body didn’t feel real. Nothing did.
Henry. My Henry.
The only thing I ever wanted to not lose. The only thing I didn’t plan for. I had seen the end. I had seen it a thousand ways. I had left to save him. I had left.
And he died anyway.
The sky doesn’t open for gods who cry. It stays blue. It stays dry. It stays indifferent.
I curled up on the floor. Pressed my face to wood that smelled like dust and rot and the scent of a world without him. I bit my arm to stay quiet. I failed.
I howled. Not like a man. Not like a god. Like something ancient and wrong and breaking in half.
Time slipped sideways. I was not in the room. I was everywhere we’d been. The bluff. The stream. The ridge where I carved a spiral. He kissed me there.
He called me back to myself.
And now I am no one.
I write this in ash. In blood. In the sound of a name I’ll never hear again.
Henry.
My love.
My ruin.
He is gone, and I will never be whole again.
I CAN’T FUCKING BREATHE!
