The First Moment
Copyright© 2026 by TMax
Chapter 1: Unexpected
“Four,” he said, in a soft voice, with no inflection, no emotion, because the gun on the center of my forehead held all the emotion he needed to convey. It also held my emotion.
The dull silver barrel moved in and out of focus. Behind the gun, his brown eyes, with an almost healed cut above his right bushy brown eyebrow, didn’t blink, didn’t move, as they stared into mine. His forehead and cheeks had deep creases, which surrounded a broken, off-center nose, and pale pink, thin lips. Only his eyes had a human quality. Everything else looked like a statue chiseled from pale granite with ugly brown age spots. He didn’t appear to breathe or move. Except for the word, I would have thought of him as an ugly manikin.
“Three.” His lips barely moved. He had a prominent chin and sharp jawline. Almost no neck, and narrow shoulders with long arms. His frayed suit jacket ended halfway down his forearm, and the pot belly made it so he couldn’t button up the shiny blue jacket. The green shirt didn’t clash but rather complemented the blue jacket and reminded me of a turbulent sea. His baby blue pants clashed with the top, but looked great with his red sneakers.
I squeezed my fist. The cubic zirconia of my wife’s engagement ring, which I wore on my pinkie, pressed into my palm, and hurt, but also reminded me of better times. Times when this person didn’t have a gun pressed against my forehead, and the moment when I proposed to my wife.
“Two.” Sour breath, but also sweet, like he sucked candy to cover his bad breath. His messy brown hair had white dust in it, but most importantly, the gun, which he held to my forehead, didn’t move. The silver barrel reflected the green plants around us, fake green plants, which looked too green and smelled like plastic. Someone had recently smoked in the room because a stale odor hung in the air. Not the man with the gun, because he smelled like butterscotch while the gun smelled like fresh oil.
My vanilla aftershave, my daughter’s favorite scent, increased as sweat rolled down my cheeks and down the front of my shirt.
“One.” I didn’t know him. I just met him when I accidentally walked into the room, and he held the gun to my head. For the first six numbers, I could only stare at the gun pointed just above my nose. Now, with less than one second to live, my brain started to notice things and began to formulate plans. Crappy, useless plans that all involved him dropping the gun, or miscounting, or the Gods to teleport me away.
No luck.
I wanted my last moment back. I wanted the last ten seconds back, because new plans had formed, ways to disarm him, to duck, to do something much more than just stand still and die.
The gun clicked as he pressed the trigger, past the firing mechanism, past the point of no return, all my plans vanished. Nothing, I had nothing to think about as the hammer moved into position.
And then the bastard, whom I didn’t even know, pulled the trigger that minuscule bit, enough to release the hammer, to condemn me. His right index finger, with a cracked yellow nail and grease on the first knuckle, flexed. The silver, highly polished trigger moved, dull silver, not like the rest of the gun.
And.
I still lived.
No bang.
No bullet.
Just a series of clicks as the hammer slammed into an empty chamber and the cylinder clicked around.
I collapsed to the floor. An image of my wife, former wife, with her massive smile, bright white teeth, ruby red lips, blue eyes that sparkled in the sunlight, her arms wrapped around my daughter, while in the background, birds hung in the blue sky, white-capped waves rolled over rocks covered in shells. The scent of the sea filled my mind, a memory of the perfect moment, our last perfect moment. Moments later, we argued about ice cream, a stupid argument that seemed so important at the time. My eyes fluttered open in an attempt to clear that image and return to this moment and the reality of my life.
Plastic potted plants lined the walls. Fake green with yellow leaves. One tree even had a fake yellow bird in it. The white door, with black smudged handprints, that I had used to enter the room, stood out against the photo-realistic picture of a forest on the other walls. It had no doorknob and an almost seamless crack, so tight that my utility knife wouldn’t even fit between the wall and the door, and locked, or at least unopenable.
I searched for another way out, because why build something like this if it didn’t have a way out? Of course, my mind screamed that it didn’t need a way out. Just a sadistic fun house or a practical joke, but the monkey brain always assumes the worst. The logical me, me in other words, agreed that the builders didn’t need to build a way out, but the big but, if I assume the worst, no way out, then I die, right here. Someone may save me, but I would have given up, given up control of my destiny.
Sure, as a human, I will panic, freeze, but also as a human, I can choose to continue, persevere, change my focus, re-frame the situation into a puzzle, something I never enjoyed, but a puzzle meant someone constructed this, obvious with the fake plants. A puzzle meant a solution, solvable by logic, and a will to look. The empty gun proved my point. Who would point a gun at someone and not shoot them?
For the millionth time since I arrived here, I wished that I had my phone.