Chapter Text
The stage is set- cold concrete, water-stained wood paneling, and the spice of gunsmoke. A young man lays dead; another two are alive. The day is cold, and the pervasive scent of sweat and blood has suffused into the green of his shirt.
When he dies, the he which you are, it’s only a third as stimulating as you had anticipated. You had constructed it, cleverly, inside your mind; the sensation of your being coming unspooled, cleaved from the fibrous tissues of your life on Earth, sent spiraling toward something greater. Drifting into the ionosphere. Like all of those big-budget science fiction films you loved so much in life, and whose contents you squirreled away in your grotesquely-stuffed DVD shelf, already rife with the identifying features of your discerning tastes. Tastes you shared with what little friendship you had in this life- how many times have you done this? How many times have you watched them cut down by the right-hand of your life’s fiction?
[Somewhere, in a location not far from where you lie down to die, the stage is set for the slaying of your killer. The knight cleaves the heads of the false prophet.]
When you do die, however, it’s more akin to the cold-shock sensation suspended between an unexpected sleep and immersion in a pool. You expected needles and teeth. What you received, though, was the blunt, repetitive gnawing of some addled animal on the coils of your organs. The hole inside of you is hardly new; you had been so terribly, horribly empty for so long now, and it seems the bullet’s vestigial passage was only its final culmination. When the remnants of your blood rush down the front of your jeans, pooling into your wanton hands, you feel a grim resignation in that it, this, is the inevitable outcome for people, for characters, like yourself. A hare whose foot is caught in a trap, gnawing fruitlessly at its treacherous leg. A bird collides with an unseen window. Your head spins.
Dying feels like sleep. Dying feels like living, only worse. For you, dying feels like slumping down a wall, imagining all of the unread emails that will protract your funeral procession into infinity as the memory of you can never truly die. Will you live on in the minds of persistent advertisers? Who will tell your parents, or will it even matter? Were you written as having parents? You find it impossible to recall their faces, or even their names. You forget the high school you attended. You forget any memory which you were not commanded to have, and the hand of the writer stills as they struggle to grant you a middle name. You forget each moment which preceded this one.
Dying feels like your head, distantly, colliding with the wall. Your hat, ever-resolute, stays on. The camera tumbles from your hand, and you curse it; the SR5 will, without your intervention, fail to autofocus, and blurrily pan to the blue-gray of a distant wall. The effort required to regain your hold on the device ends in a bloodied squelching which you’re certain is something crawling from inside of you, full from the contents of your being. You choke on blood.
Somewhere, someone calls/cries for you- your name is spoken, though not for the last time.
In death, there is an abundance of paths, stretching out infinitely along the picturesque horizon. Glowing white threads pulled from a grand textile design, all with their unique exceptions, perversions, subversions; endings which are absurd, endings which are dismal, endings which are hopeful- more hopeful than the fate you were dealt. Endings which were speculated upon but never wrought- endings which are, posthumously, introduced, albeit deceitful. A long line of dead Jays lie in trenches which were dug when the story began, and here you stand, with a shovel in your frozen hands. Before you, in the tooth-like stream of headstones, is your own. The quilt of your life has grown threadbare, and the haphazard repairs made to its tattered surface tear with the force of your body giving way.
You were written as dead. You were dead even before you were spared a moment to die, before the bullet found its home inside of you; as you were woven into the narrative, so you were cut down. Foolish as you are, you could not have foreseen that your fate was already inscribed upon the stone. When your eager, idle hands found the tapes, already had the flowers consumed your tombstone- how many times have you done this thing, dying? How many tries to get it right, how much blood dousing the bed of papers beneath your stiff body?
When you stretch out your hand along the narrative’s linear path, you watch it distort along the imperceptible curve; your white-knuckled fingers, which might have been your mother’s (though you find it difficult to remember her name, or even her face, or what quality of her hands might live on in yours), are pulled toward the consumptive heart of the story in which you exist.
You slump into sleep, and the cold embrace of catatonia holds you more tenderly than anything you could ever recall.
Somewhere, a man, whose shirt is soaked with blood, begins to arrange a room filled with chairs. Water pours in from beneath the cracked windows. Somewhere else, more distantly, a man drives the blade of a pen-knife into the soft flesh of a carotid artery.
[The curtains draw closed. Marcet sine adversario virtus. His, and your weapon, tumbles down the stairs.]