High Strung and Low Notes

He shuffled through the music store, a bearded octogenarian in a blazer and pants, both threadbare, long out of fashion.

Squinting through the same glasses that perched on the bridge of his nose for thirty years, he wandered among the violins and violas, guitars and banjos, even the harps, pausing to extend a hand to plink seemingly random notes from instruments throughout the stringed instruments section.

The store clerk's two passes at him were politely waved-off and declined with, "I'm alright, thanks," and "I just don't know what I'm looking for," forming the clerk's silent assessment that this was probably a former music teacher or symphonic player.

His indecision was born from wanting her dead without the mess and gore of the garrote decapitating her.

He was about to commit double murder.

He would take her life, and also kill the bone-dissolving cancer before witnessing its quietus on her frail and listless form, the woman he'd known as a young and vibrant girl, and married on a Spring day he often revisited with vividity.