There's a noise that sounds like firecrackers inside her skull, intermittent pops that go off without rhythm or source, and she thinks, dizzily, of aneurysms, of the bulge and burst of the overstretched blood vessel, the flood of cellular death that follows.
She knows that's not the sound. It's a tattered, flimsy alternative she clutches like a blanket worried down to a threadbare frayed scrap. She twists her head down off her arm and lets her forehead hit John's collarbone as her heart rate picks up all over again, her throat closing around her breath like a fist.
There is nothing that comes after a person dies except a final release of chemicals, a theoretical hallucinatory aurora before the cessation of consciousness.
Her knees on a sticky kitchen floor. Her face turned up with blood on it, blood in her teeth, blood in her hair. Something in her gone electric and urgent, an arc current snapping and incandescent and assuredly fatal.
There's nothing that comes after you die. The thought terrified her, once, when she was young, and the worst thing she could imagine was that would be no more her. It doesn't scare her anymore. When she dies, she'll be over and done, and there will be no her to miss having been - when she dies, there will be no angel of judgment waiting to count out her sins or her graces, no hell to burn in or heaven to covet.
A hard blow to the chest, and before she could start to understand it, another to the head. Just like that. Her breath is coming too fast and shallow.
It isn't her death that scares her.
"John," she says.
"John, I need to know," she says, to her best friend, to the theoretical hallucinatory flood, to the angel of judgment, and she's shaking like reeds in the storm, "Did you make it? Did I save you?"
cw: violent gun death, existential dread
She knows that's not the sound. It's a tattered, flimsy alternative she clutches like a blanket worried down to a threadbare frayed scrap. She twists her head down off her arm and lets her forehead hit John's collarbone as her heart rate picks up all over again, her throat closing around her breath like a fist.
There is nothing that comes after a person dies except a final release of chemicals, a theoretical hallucinatory aurora before the cessation of consciousness.
Her knees on a sticky kitchen floor. Her face turned up with blood on it, blood in her teeth, blood in her hair. Something in her gone electric and urgent, an arc current snapping and incandescent and assuredly fatal.
There's nothing that comes after you die. The thought terrified her, once, when she was young, and the worst thing she could imagine was that would be no more her. It doesn't scare her anymore. When she dies, she'll be over and done, and there will be no her to miss having been - when she dies, there will be no angel of judgment waiting to count out her sins or her graces, no hell to burn in or heaven to covet.
A hard blow to the chest, and before she could start to understand it, another to the head. Just like that. Her breath is coming too fast and shallow.
It isn't her death that scares her.
"John," she says.
"John, I need to know," she says, to her best friend, to the theoretical hallucinatory flood, to the angel of judgment, and she's shaking like reeds in the storm, "Did you make it? Did I save you?"