Quack quack quack the world just fucking never stopped and here Cleopatra was standing with a pearl encrusted pistol in her hands wondering who she could shoot from behind the French windows of her palace – the pigeons, the sparrows, the children, or the men. There were women, too. She could pick anyone. This freedom of choice exhilarated her. The conventional ending of this strange scene, she thought, would be that in a great tragic revelation of the futility of the world she would end up killing herself.

But if one thing Cleopatra was certain of – it was that she would never shoot herself. At the end of her bullet, there would always only be the skull of another person.