Bulletproof
The sound of the gunshots still lingered in the heavy morning air, the smell of the gunpowder mingling with the iron rich scent of blood.
The street was in what could only be described as carnage. Broken furniture and just as broken human bodies littered the small street that only a few days earlier had been an unassuming side street in the slums of Saint-Michel. But then the men had come, no more than boys really, with their youth and hope and light and burning desire for a better world, a free world, where all were equal and where children didn't starve while the so called righteous hurried past and where men worked themselves to an early grave to feed their families.
These boys, these revolutionaries, had been followed by guns and the National Guard, not by the people that they fought for. But they had remained, certain that others would join them, they had sung reckless songs to hide the fear, and had drunk to hide from the realization that no one was coming.
Death had followed the guns, and one by one the revolutionaries had fallen, another young life snuffed out before it had even truly begun. The leader had died last, trapped on the top floor of the café that had formed the back wall of their barricade; the back wall of their self-created prison. He had died in a blaze of passion, that charming young man who was capable of being terrible, that savage Antinous. Men had followed him despite his age, despite the fact he looked younger than his tender twenty-two years. They were drawn to the fire that burned in his sky blue eyes, the passion that he ignited in people. One would have said, to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary apocalypse.
But that passion was extinguished by the firing squad, the eyes that had captured men's souls stilled by eight small pieces of lead. He lay on the floor of the destroyed room whose walls rang with the hopes of tomorrow, a tomorrow for them that never came. Beside him lays another, their hands linked together in a final silent rebellion. The drunken cynic, the antipathy of this transcendent Apollo, had remained loyal unto the last.
Another is in this room, the only human living. Her tangled hair falls in a curtain that brushes the cheek of the deceased leader. His head with its crown of golden curls rests in her lap and her tears falls upon the alabaster skin. Is she a mistress? Did the marble lover of liberty have another love? Or is she a follower, weeping for the man that she thought would change the world, weeping for the new world that she thought would rise up like the sun?
She sings softly a song from the night before, a bold, bravado filled song that seems pitifully ironic in this moment. "I'm bulletproof, nothing to lose, fire away, fire away. Ricochet; take your aim. Fire away, fire away. You shoot me down, but I won't fall. I am Titanium. You shoot me down but I won't fall, I am Titanium."
The splintered stairs creak as a National Guardsman climbs up, alerted by the sound of singing. He holds his loaded musket at the ready, prepared for everything but what he sees. The girl senses his presence and turns to face him. Her eyes are filled with tears and a quiet desperation. Not desperation to live… desperation to die. The tricolour rosette pinned to her clothing sways his decision. The barrel of the musket lifts as the girl turns back to her mourning.
"I'm bulletproof, nothing to lose, fire away, fire awa…"
A lone gunshot echoes in the heavy morning air.