73
by Ty Webb_Archive
I just bashed this out this morning (first draft) and I'm not sure where it's going yet. More of a rough sketch than a scene or story yet.
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“Good night.”
Just a whisper, an exhalation with consonants like the beating of flies' wings. Before he could wonder who said it, his world went black. And now “wonder” and “who” and “world” meant nothing. Were nothing. Nothing was nothing. He felt suffocated, though he wasn’t breathing. Just a weight on his mind like a heavy book on his chest, pushing out thought, squeezing identity through cosmic cracks, oozing, sliding down and away from a void. Then….then stillness. And light.
“What the fuck was that?” he said and started at the hollow quality of his voice. No, not hollow. Spectral. Those words hadn’t come from his throat. He said them but they hadn’t come from him. Just materialized around him. And to his leaping terror, more words, not his own, did the same.
“I’d say a 9mm. Took out the anterior and posterior frontal lobe too. Bet you didn’t even feel it! Damn!”
“Fuck! Who are you? Where are you?”
Another whisper like the first, a cobweb in his ear. “Who do you think I am?” He felt himself, something like himself, jump straight up. Grinding bone-on-bone laughter from behind and to his right (did he have a right?).
“Sorry about that, man. But that bit never gets old.”
Coalescing as he turned was the shimmering figure of a young man, not unlike him. Medium height, a shock of unruly black hair over his right eye, long limbs and loose elbows.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Hey, take it easy, man. Don’t get ‘em in a knot.”
“Get what in a knot?! There's nothing to knot! I can’t feel anything. I can’t even feel my feet. Everything’s all fucking dust and moonlight. I feel like I’m in a Wes Craven….hang on, did you say 9mm?”
“Mmmhmmm.”
“I was shot.”
“Fucking A.”
“Sooooo….what? I’m unconscious in the ambulance and I’m dreaming?”
“Dude, do you even know what your frontal lobe is? That shit is GONE. You don’t get ambulance rides and wacky dreams when your frontal lobe is all over the passenger’s seat of your Camry.”
He collapsed. No, he tried to collapse. No knees to buckle. No vision to narrow. No breath to whoosh out.
“Fuck! I can’t even fucking panic properly! What the fuck?!”
“You really like that word, huh?”
“Hey, fuck you, man! I just died, okay? I’m a little on edge and yeah, I fucking like to curse.”
“You people are always such babies about this.”
“Look, are you here for a reason or do you heckle fresh corpses for fun?”
“Sparkling personality, a wonderful vocabulary, and you’re bright to boot.”
“I’m not so dead I can’t pick up sarcasm.”
“You really don’t know who I am?”
“Come on! Where’s the robe? The skeletal fingers? You don’t honestly expect me to believe you’re…you know…”
“Death. The Grim Reaper. The Boatman. Yama. You got it.”
“No robe? No pasty face? No scythe?”
“What are we, in a Bergman movie?”
“And what’s with the way you talk? You sound like…well, like me, but without so much cursing.”
“How should I sound? ‘Thine thread hast Atropos cut and thine mortal journey endeth.’ Come on. I’m Eternal. You know, outside time? I look and talk however I want. It’s just easier to communicate with you people if I talk the way you do.”
“Seems like a bit of a rip-off.”
“Well, fuck you, man. I’m not putting on a puppet show here.”
Last edited by
Ty Webb_Archive on Sun Sep 16, 2007 6:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You had me at Sex Traction Aunts Getting Vodka-Rogered On Glass Furniture
