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She beat against my chest with her fists. Her blows were weak and desperate. She tired easily and pushed me away, turning her back.

I stood perfectly still, watching the gentle curve of her neck, her upper body racked with sobs, I found myself deeply attracted to her.

Perhaps I should have let her do it. I could simply have watched, and observed her delicate feet dangling and twitching inches above the ground, while the coarse rope worked on her trachea and spine.

Looking back, I’m now sure that I should have let her die, up there in the dark canopy of that oak tree.

It's a moot point now though - what I ought or ought not to have done. After all, I went to the park looking for the same thing didn't I?

After a time, she calmed herself and turned to me. I expected shame or embarrassment, but found only defiance.

"Why?" She implored. Her voice wavered, but there was a strange purpose, a dulcet determination I found almost heartbreaking.

I shrugged my shoulders and lipped a cigarette, unable to find anything appropriate to say or do.

The wind whipped up and blustered through the trees.

I lit the cigarette and dragged deeply. When I looked up again she was staring fiercely at me, into me. The question still burned in her eyes.

" I don't know," I replied simply.

" You-don't-know?" She pronounced each word deliberately. " Who the hell do you think you are?"

I thought about it for a moment, but the words spilled from my mouth before I could stop stop them; " because I care about you."

She laughed. It was a dry, bitter sound.

" You care about me? You don't even know me!"

" That's how I feel," I said quietly.

" Bastard!," she spat and threw herself onto the bench beneath the oak tree

Everything fell silent.
" How's your neck?" I offered finally. I couldn't bear her silence. She rubbed it gingerly. It had begun to bruise. She had long since stopped spluttering and wheezing, but her throat and neck still pained her.

" It hurts like hell okay." I offered a cigarette, for lack of anything else to give. I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming urge to give to her and to never stop. What it was I was meant to give I can't be certain.

" Does it look I need a smoke?" she retorted angrily.

I think I smiled. I found the idea of such an aversion to so simple a vice quite bizarre, particularly in one who had come to a desolate park at two in the morning to hang herself. But then this situation, the ‘us' out there in the wintry dark was equally if not more bizarre.

" You'll thank me," I said presently, knowing that if any thanks were due it was I should be offering them. She stood, her fists knotted in trembling balls of anger.

Tears now. Streams rolling across her cheeks into the hollow of her throat.

" Thank you?" She yelled. " What do I have to be thankful for? My life? Your heroic deed?" She threw her arms up in the air. Her entire body was shaking. " Why am I even talking to you? You arrogant son-of-a-bitch."

She paced up and down, one hand in her hair, the other resting against the small of her back.

" Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just maybe, I didn't want this?"

" No it didn't," I replied. Again my answer was sodden and inept. She was drawing up all of my stupidity, drawing it to the surface. I felt naked out there in the cold. I hated her for that, but nothing, absolutely nothing else.

" If what you're saying is true, why did I choose this place? Look at it!" She swept her arm and I glanced around me. It was indeed remote, choked with trees, gnarled brambles and skeletal thickets.

"I know what you're feeling," I said. And I really did understand.

She said nothing. She merely took a considered step forward and levelled her glare at me. Her eyes were a vicious streak of black mascara, her lips a blur of lipstick. I found it compelling that she had taken the time to make-up her face.

Before I could react, her hand screamed up out of the gloom and struck my left cheek. I was more aware of the sound than the pain, which bit at my face. She withdrew her hand and we were left staring at each other.
We were, I think, on the brink of something: Understanding perhaps. We were both keenly aware of it.

" I'm going," she said finally, clearing her throat.

" Looks to me as if this is the only place you have left." I nodded to the noose, hanging stiffly from the tree.

She smiled sadly.

" At least I have something." She was glorious in her defiance. I wanted to hold her, but she had resolutely crossed a line that I had neither the inclination or nerve to myself.

" Doesn't seem like much of an option," I replied.

My fingers teased the stock of the .38 snub-nosed revolver in my jacket pocket.

" There's so much distance for you still to cover," she said with a sudden unnerving tenderness. She stroked my cheek. It felt like a whisper.

" You can't stop it. It's not your right. You can't stop that which was meant to be. Don't you understand?"

I did. Though she would never have believed it.

" What happened her changes nothing," she sighed.

Then, as suddenly and violently as I had discovered her, she turned and walked away. I felt the world slipping beneath me, away from me.

I fished out the gun and leveled it in her direction, aiming for the back of her head. Before I drilled the solitary bullet, my bullet, into her, there was a flash of clarity, of blinding lucidity and the world rushed back with tremendous force. The night was alive, it had a wondrous texture and taste.

The top of her skull flew away into the night. Shards of bone and gristle leapt into the air in a veil of deepest red.

She fell.

Afterwards I walked along the river-bank for hours, watching the gentle plumes of mist curling up into the early morning sunshine.

We had both sought the same end there in the park, but it was I who lacked conviction. She, this unnameable beauty, found what she was looking for, even if only in the kindness of a stranger.