Thursday 27 March 2014

Bedroom Ballistics

She whipped out the automatic and pressed its muzzle into his belly. In her fury she envisioned his flabby gut enveloping the gun and absorbing it into its mass. Her professional override clicked in and offered V²/(2xS) instead. The bullet’s kiss off would likely be smothered not by his bulk, but by his proximity. The projectile would not possess enough time to accelerate from the subsonic to supersonic velocity in order to wreak its trauma. Limited acceleration, limited damage according to F=MxV². Fortunately his reflexive backing away helped unblock that particular stricture. Recoil ushers in recoil, as her countenance shot him a rictus smile with the unassailable truth of KE (Kinetic Energy) = ½mv² 

His palms were splayed out in front of him in the timeworn gesture of soothing. Dampening down. Importuning her to take it easy. With the triangulation of her, him and the gun, she plotted whether the upraised palms were protecting some vital part of his body. Not that it would matter, she could shoot him through the hand and it will still likely carry on to penetrate his vitals. VRt = VR Cos r.

His hands would only serve as crosshairs for her as he continued his backing away. Zeroing her in on his nether regions. Or never seen regions in the fat lump. Again he was unwittingly doing her a favour. She pictured the projectile scything through his imploring fingers. Those duplicitous fingers that had plied and kneaded the flesh of another woman. The fingers had strayed, could the flesh and bone now deflect the unerring reproach of her snub-nosed love letter? Did he imagine himself to be some sort of super-hero? He was about as far removed from one as you could get. As witnessed by his unheroic continued retreating. 

That was the thing about living a double life. You were still only possessed of a single body. Quantum mechanics EΨ ≠ HΨ be damned. Well might he continue to paw at me at night, but she could tell that it was desultory. Cursory. That his appetites had already been sated elsewhere and there was no real hunger behind the dead pressure on her breast or neck. She could see through his charade. And soon after the bullets do as bullets do, she would be able to see through his body too.

He was still backing away. She wondered how far he’d have to retreat before he was out of range. From the gun if not her yet more searing wrath. Actually it was no wonder at all. Simple precession equation, with little in the way of temperature or atmospheric pressure fluctuation to account for. Ergo R = vo√(2h/g). Course their house wasn’t large enough for him to escape the range of the bullet. Even though he’d almost reached the stairs now. 

She opted to close the gap once again and started advancing upon him. Normally he could easily outstride her as when they walked together out in the street, how that should have been a warning as to how much of a mismatch they were. But here he was walking backwards, plus going down the stairs, while some of his momentum was also diverted into the downward thrust of his hands still gesturing her like a lion tamer ∫ = Fdt.

She caught up to him double quick and this time she pushed the barrel of the gun into his cheek. She marvelled at the displacement of flesh as the barrel bevelled into his skin according to σ = C:ε. Was this how her flesh rucked and ridged under his leaden touch? When he customarily pinched her lips shut. Actually no, she surmised more applicable might be R: = ∇ x F  = 0. Mind you if she kept increasing the pressure of the barrel against his flesh, it becomes R: = ∇ x (∇ x ε). Infinitesimal strain theory, never was something so aptly named. 

*

“There, that sufficiently spice things up for you?”
“Yeah, yeah it did Babe. In parts”.
“Parts?”
“Yeah, there were stages where I could tell you were really feeling it. Etched right across your fizzog, so that you had me believe you might even go ahead and pull the damn trigger... But then, there were also those points where that pretty brow of yours pursed and furrowed and I could see how you were struggling to disengage that planet sized brain of yours from dragging you out of the moment by overthinking it-”


FD = ½ρv² CDA



Taken from the flash fiction collection "Extra-Curricular" available in print and e-book from Amazon, CreateSpace and I-Tunes

7 comments:

Helen A. Howell said...

Nice twist, you had me fooled for a while there Marc. However I have to say the equations went right over my head ^_^

Deanna Schrayer said...

ahhaha....scary fantasy that and you certainly had me fooled, I thought for sure she would shoot him. I love "snub-nosed love letter". Like Helen though, the equations threw me for a loop.

Larry Kollar said...

That was interesting - all a game to give her mind a chance to ponder the equations of death!

Sonia Lal said...

I believed it until the end! Nice.

Like this line: unerring reproach of her snub-nosed love letter?

Also, interesting to add all those formulas.

Steve Green said...

The formulae for a fulfilling love life?

Denise said...

Oh my word! There's one in the eye for formulaic writing...

Katherine Hajer said...

Well, if he's the sort that gets his partner to play a game with him and then totally breaks the mood to give a critique and whinge about how she's "too smart", I think she should dump him anyways.