Accountant v. Acrobat

The Accountant stands in a field in a rural area outside the city where he works. The Acrobat stands there too. They both stand in an empty field and on a table - a well-crafted rosewood table, by the look of it made by Shakers - under the canopy of a solitary oak there rests two loaded pistols. The Acrobat is eating a pear and the Accountant takes the folded newspaper held under his arm and places it on the table.

How did we come to be here, the Accountant asks. The Acrobat shrugs and says he wonders the same but he's not a man predisposed to dwell on the origin of things but to train his body to meet the demands of the routine he's developed. He's a lithe one, hard-faced, affects an air of disillusionment, countered only by the passion with which he eats the pear. He states (unnecessarily) that it's a good pear, and the Accountant asks (even more unnecessarily), is it really, and the Acrobat nods and throws the core and the stem - the stem having detached from the core - at the trunk of the oak, where they bounce off, landing at the base, propped by a root of the oak.

I've studied this routine and think I understand it in its entirety and so if you don't mind let's get started, said the Acrobat, who was stretching.

The Accountant, a tall, doughy middle-aged man with a bulbous nose and large tortoise frame bifocal eyeglasses, in a white shirt with no tie and a pair of size 54 dark grey slacks, and black patent leather shoes his wife had found on sale at the outlet store not in their suburb but another just a bit further down the highway, says okay. Let's choose guns the Acrobat says. The Accountant and Acrobat stand over the table and, after inspecting both guns, chose their gun. Let's walk out to the field, the Acrobat says, and the Accountant says okay.

They walk out to the field, standing 15 paces from each other. Then the Accountants says it's still nagging him. What, says the Acrobat. Just the question before, says the Accountant. There doesn't seem much accounting for it. The Acrobat asks if this is an accounting joke, but the question is lost on the Accountant, who wasn't joking.

They raise their guns. Their guns go off.