A/N: A prose experiment. It is a novella, told in this peculiar fashion from beginning to end.

Burying Dirt

Chapter One: A Kind of Life

Two dead flies on the rooftop ledge. Two.

A dead moth at her feet on the rooftop. One.

And she was neither alive nor dead. Nothing. Zero.

Reaching in her leather jacket pocket, she exhumed her Company phone.

TOAPD
Today, ASAP
Report completion

She knew she was officially in hell.

When the CIA began using its own acronyms...Since the CIA was a damned acronym. Acronyms using acronyms.

Termination Ordered As Per Discussion. TOAPD.

ASAP. Well, that was an acronym with some age on it, predating the Age of Acronyms. Unlike the dead flies, the dead moth. The tar splatched on the rooftop stuck gummily to her shoes. And she would do it.

Termination. Attempt it. But, with her, to attempt was to succeed. She had a blemishless record.

Snow white. Lilly white. Whiter than any fuller could white it.

Spotless. A lamb in whom there was nothing but guile. By others' blood, she was saved.

She spat on the rooftop, disgust her constant companion, bile rising to choke her.

There should have been a sign on the wall when she signed the Company papers. Sign only if you have an exit ticket. And then, in the next room, the one they took you to after signing: There are no exit tickets. The Company — easy to enter, hard to leave. The kind of life in which it was an insult to live and die. A kind of life.

Working with tight efficiency, she opened the briefcase she had positioned on the rooftop, beneath the ledge. She flattened it on the corpse of the moth, and after opening it, used her sleeve to brush away the corpses of the flies. She lived among corpses. She gave it no thought. Or tried to. Not to.

She assembled the rifle, piece by piece. Each click or tightening was a click or tightening in her. By the time the rifle was assembled, she and it had become one, each a weapon and nothing more.

But the rifle was meant to be a weapon and nothing more. She had to kill herself each time she assembled the rifle to kill her target. She became bored out, a channel for an explosion, a pathway for a projectile. Her only power stopping-power.

She affixed the scope and began to work on zeroing in the target.

Zero. Not dead, not alive. Her, not the target. The target was alive but would soon be dead. Not a zero. Not a corpse. An about-to-be-corpse.

She examined the target through the scope, like a biologist scientist examining a microscopic creature on a slide.

The target was a man. Tall. Lanky, even. Curly hair. Smile.

Nice smile. She blinked and looked down to realize she'd brushed the dead flies onto her black boots. Death march.

She made herself look through the scope again.

"Really?" She asked herself silently, laughing so too. "This guy?"

He was a clerk or something. At some stupid box store. He was outside, manning a booth, under a sign. Ask me how I can help you? He had curly hair. He smiled. She had dead flies on her boots.

"Maybe a mistake." She ventured the hope. She scrolled through photos on her phone. There he was. The photo, especially on the phone screen, did not do him justice.

She would not either. Whatever it was she was going to do, she doubted justice had much if anything to do with it. Likely, the termination was unsanctioned.

Stopped caring. She had stopped caring about that months and corpses ago. But there had been sanctioned corpses before those.

The moth-corpse was beneath her briefcase. Dead flies. Boots. Death march.

She tinkered with the scope. The shot was simple. Across a parking lot. One round. His head would snap backward. He would feel nothing and would feel nevermore. World without end, Amen.

Nice smile. She tracked him as he moved from behind the booth. A young girl, tall, had approached the booth. She was pink. Rather, she was in pink, a Romantic tutu. Layers of tulle.

Before black boots, long before, the assassin had been a ballerina herself. She knew the types of tutu. Stupid to know that now, given her life. Stupid things floated to mind when waiting to kill another human being. She had spent a lot of the last ten years waiting.

Nice smile. Curly hair. He was helping the tutu girl. Her dad. The girl was staring at him, grateful. The assassin read his lips, knew what he said. "Real ballerinas are tall."

A lie. A kind lie. The girl beamed. Her father.

She would not kill him now, not with the girl there. Her father.

Leaning back, she stopped looking through the scope. He looked different, the man, from the distance, seen with her naked eyes. The scene. It looked different.

She waited. Some of the mortar between the bricks of the ledge was crumbling. She picked at it.

Her too. Mortar crumbling. Pieces of herself falling. All this had once made sense to her. A kind of sense. The view in the scope. The knife in the hand. The needle in the flesh. Orders. Missions. Objectives.

Using one boot, she knocked the dead fly off the other. Repeat. She looked up. The ballerina and her father were gone.

The assassin thought about her father. Her abortive childhood. Misspent. Like all of her life. All leading here, to dead bugs and a trigger to pull.

The man had done something. Hacked something. He was a hacker, had a code name, something to do with fish. She had not cared about that. She could remember it if she needed to.

She looked at him through the scope again. He was just standing. No one nearby. She buried her phone in her jacket pocket. She had an exit strategy.

Piece of cake.

ASAP. She exhaled slowly and tightened her grip on the trigger.

Nice smile. Tighter.

More?