SILAS

I am an angry soul. Perhaps we all are. If you're not, then you're just kidding yourself. You've got blinders on. You haven't allowed yourself to look, really look, at the world around you. At the reality we exist in.

Let's face it. Reality is fucked.

I can recall, time and again, having looked at the various members of my family, and thinking...they're gonna die one day. They're gonna die, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

There was no way of knowing when, or how. Maybe it would be slow, and painful, like cancer, or some other terminal condition, slowly wasting away while I and other loved ones have to watch. Maybe it would be quick, painless, and merciful, at the end of a long, fulfilled life. If there even is such a way to die. People tell stories about eighty-year-old men and woman passing away in their sleep, peacefully drifting off from this life and into the next. But I've also heard that sometimes when people die in their sleep, they are discovered with both their eyes and mouth open in a silent scream.

I know I'm not supposed to think about that. I know it, though no one has told me so. It's one of those unspoken rules of society. Healthy, functional people don't obsess over death. They instead focus on the bright side. They do their best to enjoy life while they have it.

But the stoic mindset, practical as it might be, has never come easy to me. I know there's no point in obsessing over things I can't control. Rationally, I know that, and have always known. But that never stopped me from having those dire visions of death, like nightmares in the light of day. The dark, evil side of a daydream, one you can't stop or look away from.

Often, it happens in the form of a car accident. I, or a loved one—often a loved one—gets run off the road. Parts of the car have caved in, pinning us inside. At first we are confused, disoriented. Usually it's dark out, and the passenger door is twisted open at a weird angle, broken. The whole car is turned nearly on its side, and won't stop beeping. That stupid jingle reminding us one of the doors is left open, with the key in the ignition. There's a light blinking on the mangled door, casting a red, flashing bar onto the upward slope of the ditch.

We try to turn, to take the key out of the ignition, but something's wrong. Our body doesn't want to twist that way. It doesn't seem to want to move, or pivot, at all.

Vision is blurry. There's an incessant ringing in both ears. It takes time, and an eventual reclamation of the awareness of ourselves, and of our surroundings, before we realize the truth. It takes time to truly notice the warmth and wetness running out of our torso and onto the dashboard, the stick shift, the emergency brake, the passenger seat. Things, substances, on the outside, which should be on the inside. Abandoning the body like rats on a ship destined for the deep.

Horror. That's the next feeling. There will be pain, soon. Horrible, intense pain, wracking the mind and the body. But it is the horror that comes first. We have felt it our whole lives, in little pre-emptory tastes and sips. The knowledge of death. The knowledge that one day, not so far from now, we will come to no longer be. But now the goblet rests in our hands, and we cannot help but drink, and drink deep, in great gulps and glugs. Pure, unadulterated fear. Irresistible. Unassailable. With it, comes panic. Hyperventilation. Hysteria.

Somewhere, there's an intermittent buzzing. Something lights up in the corner, nestled just next to the passenger seat, caught in the lip of the door frame. It's our phone. Ringing.

We reach for it. With everything we have. Ignoring the pain. Ignoring the wrenching, tearing feeling in our insides. We are abandoned, isolated, trapped in wreckage on the side of the road. And if there is one thing we fear more than death itself, it is dying alone.

I guess that's just how fucked I am. Was. Continue to be. But all this to say, I have no kind words for a God who made the world to be this way. I wish everyone would just come off it already, pretending life is so grand, and the world is so...'beautiful'. You'd either have to be blind, ignorant, or a fucking liar.

And yet, as much as I always blamed God, as much as I always told myself I'd give him a piece of my mind if I ever saw him, and if he even existed at—in the end, it wasn't God who killed my loved ones. It was me.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Here, in this strange, post-apoc sci-fi fantasy, I might as well be in an entirely new dimension of existence; if this place even really exists at all. None of this could be real, including this apparition of my sister Gemma, a ghost which has apparently come here to haunt my consciousness, no matter where I am. Either way, I deserve it.

Her complexion, already grey and bloodless, takes on a sickly, greenish hue under the fluorescents. Her eyes are also grey, nearly black, but also bloodshot at the same time, streaked with crimson, spider-like tendrils.

She's breathing. I think she's breathing. Or trying to breathe. Her mouth is open. Her chest heaves up and down. Her belly widens and contracts. Her elbows tuck tightly against her sides, her muscles tense, body desperate for oxygen.

It's everything I hate. Everything I was ever afraid of. Happening right in front of me. And there's nothing I can do to stop it. Just like there's nothing I can do to reverse what happened. I am bound, stripped, and peeled open. Immobilized. Even my vocal cords refuse to function. The most I can get out are these sad, strained, vocal sounds, because the words won't come. I am too weak. I've always been weak. Tied down by time, reality, my circumstances, my own character flaws and biases. Was I always destined to do the wrong thing, to fail? Was I destined to do...this?

The attempts to breathe get faster, frantic. Her eyes seem to seize on me, as if before she had been looking through rather than at me.

"Silas," she says, in a breathy exhale. "...why..."

But there is no 'why'. There is no meaning. There is no way to truly reconcile the past. No amount of escapist adventures in 'robot fantasy land'—to whatever degree you can call this a 'fantasy'—are going to change that. The past is a giant maw, hinging ever wider, with rows of massive, sword-like teeth which file down to razor points.

I remember staying up late in the months following, reading articles and watching videos on what it's like to drown. Supposedly, there's a point where the compulsion to breathe takes over, and the body begins to inhale uncontrollably in quick, mechanical gasps. Water floods the lungs, an event accompanied by intense internal pain, as if someone's dousing your lungs with gasoline and lighting it with a match.

I tried to recreate this feeling, kneeling on the bathroom floor and shoving my head into a full tub of cold water. Turns out, even with all my guilt and self-hatred, I still couldn't quite do it. Human will has it's limits. And I never had any genuine conviction, obviously, to force my head underwater and keep it there somehow, like with rope, or a brace. If I had, I might have not only experienced that burning sensation in the lungs, but also, eventually, a state called 'hypoxia', where insufficient oxygen flow leads to a lack of sensation, a lack of awareness, a general numbness of both mind and body, as all the electrical signals are cut short, and all bodily functions begin to phase out. That's the one conciliation I can afford myself when I think about what happened. That even though they did have moments of loneliness and terror, there at the end, maybe they experienced that anesthetized moment of peace as well, of not knowing, feeling, or caring. But it is a hollow hope. A morbid mental exercise that's done little to exonerate me of any guilt or grief. And why should it?

The panting. The heaving. She might still be trying to say something. I can't hear it over the ringing in my ears, and the strangely loud buzzing from the lights in the ceiling. Is it just me, or is that buzzing getting louder, more overbearing?

I can't take my eyes off of it. What's happening to her. Did it happen like this? I know she didn't look quite like this, not when it was over. Her skin was dark and blue, if not quite so gray and unnatural-looking as it appears now. She had no gunk in her hair, or holes in her face. In fact, as she was being carted up in the gurney, up from the riverbank, I honestly thought she was gonna be okay. It wasn't until I went to check, dodging the EMT's who tried to stop me, that I saw the truth. Open, dead eyes, staring directly into the bright sky overhead. Not responding when I called her name.

Please. No more. I can't do this. Please.

In a morbid way, I get my wish. Gemma's ghost seizes up, suddenly. Then she goes limp, as if in imitation of a hypoxic state. Her head lulls, and her body drifts up into the air, defying gravity. The way bodies of the drowned float up to the surface. Gases expand inside the body, making the torso buoyant. The limbs and head are pulled with it, along for the ride, bobbing and dragging in an invisible current.

"We have one rule."

The voice startles me. It is loud and alarmingly close, just next to my left ear—almost in my left ear. It is hoarse, gurgled, waterlogged.

Before I can turn my head to look, cold, wet fingers grip me by the hair at the back of my head. It feels like when I used to be grabbed by the ear when I was little. The fingers twist, clenching hard. They pull, tilting my head back at an angle, holding me there.

"Family first. Always family first."

I peer sideways, trying to get a look at my aggressor. I see one full, greenish-grey cheek, one bloodshot eye. One lock of my mother's frizzy, low-cut hair.

"And you broke it."

That grey-green face leans somehow closer, tilting. Chin jutting. Mouth opening, revealing slick, silver spires of snake-like teeth.

"You betrayed us. And for that, you go to Hell."

There is a bursting, puncturing sensation as her teeth enter my neck. Piercing. Tearing.

Bright, multi-colored squares encompass my vision, flickering. Everything is glitching. Everything is...broken.

And it always will be.