Bravery

On Saturday the twenty-first of January, Elliot took a gun, pressed it to the strip of bone between his eyes, and shot himself. The bullet shattered the frontal bone of his skull, warping his features past recognition, and burrowed through his pre-frontal cortex into the midbrain. He died before the sound stopped echoing through his empty apartment.

This story isn't about that.

I worked with Elliot for only a little while—less than six months. Most of what I knew about him came from his desk. Unlike the smaller ones the secretaries and other reporters had, it was a stately, imposing thing. It would've been terrifying, especially to a mousy little girl like me, but it was covered in paperweights and spare pens and pictures of people hunting ducks. Anyway, Elliot himself denied fear: he was middle-aged, poised on the cusp between forty and fifty. His hair had already turned grey, but he didn't dye it, like he hadn't noticed he was getting older or just didn't care. He smiled more than anyone I knew.

When we first started working together, I didn't respect him. He was the editor at the local paper. I took an internship there for a semester in my junior year of high school. For  my first project, I wrote a short column describing myself. It impressed him. "Your grammar is perfect," he commented, tapping the page with his red pen. "You're really a very talented writer."

I wanted to be professional about the whole thing, but I bristled. He spoke like I was a dog who could do a fancy trick, like because I wasn't yet eighteen I wasn't human. He didn't mean it that way, but that's how it sounded. My hands fisting and unfisting in my lap, I smiled politely and nodded. "Thanks. I worked really hard on it." When I left the room, I scowled. He was a man of an older age, a relic of a time when women were pretty pets, not professionals. I was a kid, yeah, but that was no excuse.

Over time, though, he grew on me. I think that he realized I wasn't like any of the other high school students he worked with: most of them had been looking for photography experience, but I hated that part. I wanted to write. Once he got that, we got along. "You qualify too much," he told me once, circling a very and crossing it out. "It's the only thing that always comes up when I read your work." I nodded, but I didn't get it, and he could tell. He rubbed his chin; even across the desk, I could hear the rasp of stubble. "Look." He spread his hands. "Be brave. Just let the facts speak for themselves. Nine times out of ten, we'll understand you just fine without the extra description."

I wrinkled my nose. "What about the tenth time?"

Elliot laughed and slid my paper across the desk to me. "That's what I'm for." He got to his feet, and so did I. Like always, he stuck his hand out to me, and we shook. He had a firm grip and strong, rough hands. "See you next week."

The next time I came into work, the secretary stopped me before I could get to his office. "Didn't you hear?" she whispered. "He shot himself." She looked at me, and then, hesitantly, she touched my shoulder. "You can go home, dear."  I looked down at the paper in my hands—my last column. There was a very in the first sentence; I took a red pen from the jar and crossed it out. Good advice is good advice, even if the giver is... was a hypocrite.

Once outside, I wondered why I had never noticed there were no pictures of his family on that desk.