The face...

He was falling down already...falling down fast. He could hear the swish of the air...the rush of wind on his face..it was cold and felt like a hundred needles....There were faces running in his mind...all those he had ever seen...but he was stuck on a single face now...thinking who was the one responsible for it. He turned mid-air, closing his eyes, not wanting to see the hard ground beneath. He had read about it often...skulls cracking open like a coconut opened by the vendor on the street side, pool of blood that followed...He had seen it several times in his career...He opened his eyes again and saw the myriad of colors around him...The world in a blur, he thought. It was strange how he thought of those one liners...Well they were the reasons for his success as a reporter....It was his job....To report directly from the crime scenes...Yes, that's what he had been doing all his life. He had seen all sorts of crimes...crimes of passion, crimes of murder, killings, extortion, kidnapping, mass killings, you name it...He was the best crime reporter ever, that's what they said. Huh, the fools, flatterers...none realising he could see their jealous hearts behind their faces, veiled by a smile and eyes full of admiration...Every award that he had won seemed only a piece of meaningless memory...He could see his family now...and his dead wife, smiling at him...all of them..they were waiting for him perhaps...His dead son...all of them were killed for publishing a story he was threatened not to...He saw the concrete floor now. Now he closed his eyes so tight that they hurt..."Only a moment of pain...That's the cost I am ready to pay to see all of them again..."And he fell....

He woke up with a start, sweating profusely. His heart beat frantically against his chest, as if wanting to burst out it. Now he cried, like a baby, inconsolably. Next day the newspapers carried the headline:"Award winning reporter dead, jumps off from his pvt plane without a parachute..".

And finally he knew the face responsible for all that had happened to him:His own.