She’s running out of time.
She feels the mass of that dread rolling black and thick just beneath the floorboards of her mind. “Not all is as it seems,” she’s heard people say. And that’s true. All appears calm, normative, in order, when in reality there are an untold number of vectors converging on any one person at any one time. Like a bullet fired ahead of a running target, prophesying the moment and place of death not yet realized.
More extreme examples of such morbid nexuses can be found in the corners of local newspapers and click-bait blogs. “Family of Five Killed as Passenger Train Derails into Ground Floor Apartment” type things. “They had no idea” some say, “how little time they had left.” The truth is no one has any idea when one’s proverbial train will arrive.
Most people are able to forget this underlying uncertainty. We comfort ourselves with average life-expectancy for persons in our demographic. “I’ll probably live till 70. Heck! With the way modern medicine is advancing, maybe even 80! You know my great grandfather lived to be 91.”
We do make allowances for those who die occupationally of course. Heavy machine operators slain by their very own heavy machines come as no surprise. That’s always a risk, given how heavy the machines are, and the operators know that. Same goes for a free climber who plummets to his death scaling Half Dome. She wonders what sound it made. What sound he made when he hit the ground. The sources don’t say. Did he blow apart or did he simply stop? She doesn’t know, but those who found him said he looked asleep save for the blooming crimson halo about his head. “He knew it might happen someday,” is how we assuage the dread.
She, in contrast, cannot forget the fragility of even the most standard life. It is especially difficult since she has witnessed death. Knowledge that the unseen whirring of the world’s machinery could at any time mandate her departure from the land of the living instills a sense of hurry. Or worry. We often reassure her: “You’re still so young. You don’t need to worry about running out of time just yet.” But we might say “She was so young. Taken before her time.”
Sometimes the knowledge of her frailty and tenuous casting upon the stage of life can become an obsession. (It is well known that many of the best actors have been cut from production with no explanation and in ways that might have better befit a drunken belligerent who won’t read the lines but that does not preclude the presence of logic in Casting’s choices). Attempts will be made by her to divine what that logic is by which such things are decided. In what manner will she meet her end: Blunt force trauma? Virus? Accident or murder? First or second degree? Terrorist attack? That’s just a different kind of murder. No… More likely disease. Or an accident. Yes.
Perhaps such theorizing is an attempt to lessen the shock or surprise of the thing when it happens. Or perhaps it is an attempt to, in her own small way, outwit God or Fate or whatever’s in charge. It is important for her to feel a sense of control, to gurgle a nonchalant “knew it!” before it all fades to black. Maybe then she could take the fun out of it for the cosmic executioner. Maybe it would chafe and itch in that obscure and swirling alien mind like a grain of sand under an eyelid. “How did she know? The bitch! Maybe I’ll resurrect her just to see how she knew. No. No. Can’t do that. I’m getting sloppy.”
Soon after becoming obsessed with the idea of her own death, she quickly becomes convinced of it’s imminence. She will die. It will be unnatural. It will be quite horrible. Hopefully tragic. She is terrified of dying on the toilet. Whatever the cause of her demise, she sometimes wishes it would just happen already and we could get this over with. You know, hit the reset button if there’s any reset to be had.
One may rightly wonder why she does not take her own life at this point.
Kill herself? What, are you insane? She doesn’t want to die, she just can’t stand the suspense. You couldn’t understand.
Suicide is breaking the rules.
People who are obsessed with their own death rarely look forward to it. It is a miserable thing, you must understand. She’s convinced that you really must be miserable and chronically afraid if you are to consider yourself part of this club. People who really want to die do. It’s not hard.
There are stories of the occasional hypochondriac or agoraphobe living well into their nineties and such tales fill her with a sense of cosmic humor and a bizarrely warm and fuzzy feeling. Hearing such accounts are to her a cool drink in a parched desert of faceless terror. However such a respite is not a rescue, and she renews her morbid calculus with all the greater fervor for the morsel of hope. Perhaps, she might subconsciously believe, if she convinces herself so entirely of the inevitability of her early and excruciating death, the Universe (which seems to have an ironic sense of humor) will be left no choice but to grant her long life. But time is up.
Her proverbial train arrives suddenly in the form of a commuter bus.
Note:
This has been my first ever fiction posted to Substack. Congratulations!! You survived! If you did enjoy this piece or found it relatable please be so kind as to tell me. If you did NOT enjoy this piece: keep it to yourself. My ego is very fragile. I’M JOKING OF COURSE. haha…
No but seriously, I am looking for feedback. Both constructive criticism and pure hype. I obviously enjoy the hype more, but I will accept the criticism with the grace of a martyr and artist, consoling myself with the knowledge that genius is hardly ever recognized in its time.
More please...:)