The Bullet Sees
by Ava Sophia Hiss
To a gunman, the most vital moment is the moment of pause; that brief silence in the sweeping of cloth and digging of his boots; the importance of the click. His trigger-pull sets off a barrage of events faster than his mind can comprehend. Instantaneously, the hammer falls: the end of the metal capsule erupts; the firing pin throws its weight against the cartridge primer; the priming compound detonates and the powder charge ignites.
Then, in a slowed world, we can watch the bullet rocket forward through a haze of grey ash and black powder, exploding from the percussed primer, through the grand chamber in a whirl of fiery sparks, burning all the way to its leadened core, spinning spectacularly from the epicenter: death’s little dancer, let loose at last.
The bullet streaks above the flat earth, striking through the airy summer’s morning, crumbling through motes of dust and uplifted sand. It soars onward and, in the middle of its voyage, passes by its twin, a fellow bullet, who is headed in the opposite direction.
“How alike we are!” the bullet says. But this encounter is brief; they pass, and our bullet moves onward.
Onward, onward! It rushes toward its target. It moves through the fiber of a blue-threaded cotton shirt. It passes through the skin. It shatters a wall of bone, and flies into the cavernous darkness beyond. It now hovers in the gorge before a gargantuan red-veined wall: a human heart, swelling silently in the midst of one-thousandth of a second’s final heartbeat. Bracing its copper-cased body against the grain, the bullet fully dives in and embeds itself deep inside. Then, the bullet relaxes, relieved in its success. It looks around, and breathes in the briny red air.
The bullet sees, hidden inside the human heart, a four-chambered grand atrium. Floating chambers and valves hung in the cobalt darkness, strewn across the abyss. Great walls of flesh climbing into the void above and below. Veins strung in a pattern of vine-grown damask. A morass of settled gore in its bowled basin.
And, above, blood hovering in its ventricles, half pumped. Blood stuck in an unshorn waterfall, thrown against itself, venous and arterial, in a frozen pantomime of pressure. Blood issuing forth a slow droning rush: coronary songs, cardiac exhalations. And beyond it all, spectre reverberations, the morphed recollections of sounds, sensations, and memories forming into hazy, half-spun visions.
Yes, that’s what they are, memories. Memories breathe in this beating cavern. Memories retreat into their own dim creases. Memories peer from pockmarks along the reddish striae. Aged memories resurface, innocent, raddled in agony. Memories shine through a darkened ventricular passage.
Haunted heart! This is a gallery of lifelong desires. Memories flaring without color, shimmering without form like the apparitions that take shape behind children’s eyelids at night: dissipating, reuniting, conjuring a picture of things unseen and immaterial. In crepuscular rays, they flash their bizarre tragedies. Bloodied beds, unheld hands. Gravestones looming quiescent over an existence of solitude. The mineral glow of childhood. The antral reverberations of half-remembered voices. The bullet breathes in, breathes out the hollow warmth.
Then the bullet suddenly cries, to the other man: “You should see how much he loves you, this enemy of yours; I can see it, hidden here inside of his heart. He hated you and loved you just as much. I can see it all. A boundless love, bound in a dying vessel.” And, in that one-millionth of a second, blurred against eternity, the bullet sits, and sees, and listens. It learns the knowledge of the dying heart.
The bullet learns of how the two gunmen first met. They were leaning at a saloon bar, drunk off their asses, revolvers strapped to their sides. They struck up a wobbly conversation about the recent news of prospecting work in the west. They spoke of that golden land waiting in California, that promised land with buried riches in Sacramento and San Francisco.
They didn’t know a thing about each other. But within the hour of their first meeting, they’d already decided to take on the journey as a duo. What the hell. Two broken-down men with no money, no prospects, and nowhere more promising. What else was there to do? They pulled on their saddleback packs and trudged off, on foot, due west.
The bullet learns of how the two men traveled together for weeks, doing odd jobs in small town saloons for their meals, taking occasional rides on prairie schooners. They moved from Utah, into Nevada, under the fiery sun, along the road until the houses fell away to decrepit shacks of departed prospectors, that fell away to sandblown ruins, that too fell away to vast emptiness. In the afternoons, the two men laid out in the sand beneath the awns of a mesquite and pulled down their wide-brimmed hats.
The two of them were similar; they would realize they were impossibly similar. They were both lone wanderers, with no family nor home. The two of them enjoyed silence and only occasionally conferred in short, meaningful sentences. The two of them ate their salted pork straight from the can, knife to mouth. They were both old enough to be grandfathers. They both agreed that women weren’t worth the effort, not really. They both liked to tell obvious lies. And they walked slowly, with no excitement, no dire purpose. Slowly, slowly, the Mojave Desert approached the southbound pair.
They crossed over the dry lip of the valley, and looked out across the shrub lands. Off to infinity lay an ashen patchwork of foliage and grey sands. Bush trees and cacti. Shrubs of brittle bush and creosote, sun-stunned tobacco flowers bowing to the sky. The hiss of life teeming beneath the wind.
They wandered on through the sunlight, day after day, under fair-weather clouds, over dusty mountains and gullies. The sun hung askew over the sliding horizon. As they walked, they’d pass the whiskey flask between them. Or a cowhide canteen of water. They’d stop occasionally to crack open a can of tinned preserves and rest. They’d watch their strings of cigarillo smoke haze away against the bluebell sky.
Sometimes they’d mention, in a grated voice, some fragment of their past: an old dream, a lost home. Once or twice, they even smiled, even called each other brothers. The stars peering down, the two men peering across the way, toward some vague land beyond. The sweat dried cool on their foreheads as the sun’s heat dipped under the flatlands and cast the land under darkness. Fireless nights, slept away under the blue moon.
But there came a feeling of dread. With each day the plants became fewer, the sound of wildlife grew more scarce. The man tried to suffocate the feeling of unease creeping in his chest. But then, when scaling a hill one day, how it seized his heart to see the flatlands collapse and reveal itself before him: an endless plain, hundreds of miles across. Not so much as a bush or tree as far as the eye could see. He ran his eyes across the arid landscape, off to the horizon where the sun’s light rose like white woodsmoke. The shrub lands gave out to a desert of nothingness, plain and simple.
They subtly changed their course, and walked along the northwest border of the shrub lands. The man eased into his steps with another kick of whiskey, as did his friend. No other traveller appeared for miles out, and then for days. When the week was through, and they still saw no sign of humanity, panic fully seized him. Before long, all the whiskey was spent, and only a few cans of beans remained. And the men, sobered and staring dumbly at the darkening sky, began to consider the reality of their circumstances.
The man understood that he, himself, had made the greatest mistake when he didn’t pack enough food and water. But then, he knew that his friend had made the most fatal mistake, when he somehow mistook some bright planet for the North Star and let himself be guided by a lie for miles and miles.
Now this man, whose heart the bullet understood, crumbled away to despair at his own stupidity. How he’d trusted in his friend’s ability to track the stars. He’d stared up at the constellations, night after night, through a daze of liquor, muzzy and double-glowing, and he had never decided to see the truth. The two men had drunkenly walked for almost a week, at the wrong angle, in the wrong direction.
And now their only hope was to head slightly more east, at a diagonal rise, in a hopeless bid to meet some travelers along the canyon’s outlook. The impossibility of this was never said aloud. They walked on, silent but for the sound of their footfalls across the crusted sand.
Now the man could finally feel the sun’s fire. He could see how it burned its black scorch-mark shadows across the beaten plateau. He looked up at the sky, the eye-searing blue, the thin, droughted clouds. The sun shone red through his rheumatic fingers.
His vision blurred, and his head rocked in the heat. There was nothing to hide under, not even the narrow limbs of a Joshua tree. He spent the days looking for water-filled barrel cacti; no sign of water, nothing. His eyes swept along the dried desert scrub, looking for the movement of animals or insects. Nothing alive.
Yet at nighttime, in the dark, invisible creatures scuttled and grunted and heaved. There was the distant cry of a coyote beyond the low dip of the valley. The high whistle-whine of a bird or a mountain lion. The scuttling of deer mice. The moonlight on the sand presented an eerie shadow show of a scorpion devouring the head of a praying mantis. The man placed a hat over his head to hide from the burning stars. His body ached for rest all through the night until daylight broke its yolk over the sky and bade him rise again.
They had been dying from the beginning. Yes, they had always been dying, he realized that now. His stomach ached with savage hunger while they sat and ate the last of their beans in a slow, ritualistic way. And as they heaved themselves up and continued to walk, every muscle of his body strung thinner with each step, worn down and torn. His blistered feet were worn to skinless nubs, his heels cracked and split to raw muscle. His desiccated skin was peeling off like flakes of burned lupine. Still, the man walked, nearly collapsing with the weight of each footfall, as he fought to keep his eyes straight ahead towards the wavering horizon.
All the while, the two men never spoke a word, never looked one another in the eyes. Their stories and hopeful lies give way to silence. One of the men slowed his pace, and the distance between them grew over time, far enough that the man couldn’t hear the other’s breaths or see his face, and could only hear his aggravated sighs, and watch his dark shadow lumbering ahead. How the man hated his friend! How he despised him now! How that final, invaluable drink of water was fought over between their calloused hands until the cowhide canteen fell on the sand, half-capsized.
His tongue was so dry, he couldn’t even speak the other man’s name, couldn’t even utter an apology as he raised his gun and the other raised his in turn.
He paused, and the other man paused, both gunmen poised for action, hanging expectantly in that breathless, infinitesimal silence. In that brief moment of pause, he searched for the slightest hint of hatred on his friend’s face. If they were going to be murderers, he hoped desperately for hatred, for his friend to show any savagery in any of this, at least to allow him the bare relief of fear or rage.
But there was no hatred there. There was no expression on the other man’s face at all, except a raw, resolute desperation. The fierce indignity of a man slave to the sole guide of his life, his base instincts. And with the pull of their triggers, it all fell away like dust, all of those pent-up ideas of brotherhood, of there being some meaning beyond hunger and thirst.
But the bullet knows the real lie of it all. Whatever friendship the two shared, it was all just this one man’s imagination. Everything, from the unspoken understanding, to the quiet companionship, to the mutual admiration. If you could see these memories for yourself, within the deep dying cavity of this man’s heart, you would read plainly the truth: these were only unspoken expectations, just a desperate hunch. A lie created by this one man, often alone, used to imagining. The two were strangers who hardly knew one another at all.
“How sad,” the bullet says. “No one has ever known this heart as intimately as I do.”
As remote as a far-off star, its dreams discarded on a carved casing, its message torn and singed, the heart will soon cease to live. With one swift passage, all of this man’s hope and hatred will be expelled from his body in a summer-strewn haze. The bullet halts in that moment, blurred against eternity, listening to the unbeating silence of the dying heart.
But its journey is not yet complete: onward, little bullet! Bracing its copper alloy sheathing against the pressure, it soars yet farther. It thuds cleanly through the other side of the heart, driving through its wall of red tissue. It reduces the pulmonary artery to a confetti pop of viscera. The bullet moves toward the man’s shoulder blade, and splits it through with a marvelous crack. There’s the eruption of a red firework across the arched, crooked canyon between his ribs. The swift movement sends waves crashing against the shore of his inner world, and it shudders in pain surging, whirling through the molten core of his body now demanding release through that small hole bored through his muscle and skin.
Here we finally witness the grand eruption, the final glorious explosion across the coin-colored sky where, just beyond human sight, the sun hangs skewered on a barren branch.
And beneath that branch lives an oasis, where the water is fresh and impossibly cold.
Copyright © 2026 by Ava Sophia Hiss
