An alarm sounded angrily, stirring me groggily from my sleep. Slowly, I quite literally roll out of bed, falling to the ground in a flurry of tangled limbs and sheets.

“Shit,” I mumbled, reaching up to turn off the annoying beeps of the machine next to my bed. That already made the score 0/3, and today had just started. Yesterday, coming back to my home, I had fallen off the elevator, tripping on the small space between the two doors. That had earned me a pitiful glance from a neighbor or two, but wasn’t even the worst one. That spot belonged to what I did the moment I stepped into my apartment.

I had somehow tripped over the doorway, stumbling several steps and even losing a shoe before my shin painfully slammed into a leg of my dining table, causing me to roll into my counter headfirst. Even though no one was around to see me laying upside down against my counter, the heat of my embarrassment upon my cheeks felt like it was enough to light 1000 fires.

Shaking the thought away, I began my normal morning routine, albeit slowly. Since I knew my usual babysitter wouldn’t be coming in today, I had to make sure I was careful enough to keep myself conscious until I could sit myself in my office seat.

The first of what would probably be several sighs slid out of my throat. It was long, using all the air in my lungs. The train of thought I had forcefully been pulled out of yesterday clearly had new fuel; as several lines of thoughts started roaming inside my head. I tried to push the thinking away and focus on making myself breakfast and ensuring I was ready to leave, but it proved to be a much harder task than it seemed.

It was a hard pill to swallow, coming to the realization that I was only 23 years old, yet nearly enslaved to the company I currently worked for. I mean, it had been 3 years with no promotion, and it would probably stay that way for another decade or so.

Still, the money was hard to say no to, and it wasn’t like I had much of a life before work anyway. I couldn’t even complete college.

However, I somehow had managed to complete jelly on toast without burning or cutting myself, so I victoriously dropped the (butter)knife in the sink and grab my lunch as I walk out my door. I could worry about those things later. For now, I just had to focus on the 5 minute walk ahead of me.

Surprisingly, I made it to the ground floor without incident, destroying the toast in not even half the time it took to make it. I stroll out the double doors gloatingly, unsurprisingly glancing at the monoscale gray in the sky above. I suddenly halted, realizing I was about to walk in the street, and a large truck’s honk screams past me. I sigh at the impatience of drivers before working myself towards the crosswalk to cross the street.

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Without my usual friend to talk to, my mind eventually shut off due to my early-morning grogginess, and I stared blankly at the road in front of me as I waited to move. I must have been a little too spaced out, though, as someone accidentally nudged me walking past, pushing me into the street. Well, being unable to catch myself caused me to stumble halfway into the street. A slight hint of panic rose in my chest until I looked up.

The sign had the walk symbol upon it.

The person who had run into me gave me a strange look as they continued walking, and the panic I had felt was replaced by embarrassment again as the walk symbol began flashing a red hand. Straightening up, I began walking again, before I could get caught in traffic.

“Goddammi-“

As if the world itself was out for me, I couldn’t even finish one word.

I barely had time to react. My eyes were still downcast, and if not for the fact that Seattle’s weather consisted of either gloomy gray sky or raining the majority of the year, I may not have even seen the headlights crash over my legs like aggressive waves. Not even half a second later, the sports car it belonged to followed. My right leg made a gruesome KRRNCH as it was crushed by the speed of the sports car, and I flipped onto the hood, shattering the windshield easily. If I wasn’t already completely numb to my body, I may have been able to fully register the shards of glass entering my side, or possibly I might’ve seen the bloodied pieces puncturing the young girl’s neck, face, and the hand she had been texting on.

She had reflexively slammed her foot onto the brake, but it was much too late, as I flopped onto the ground much like a fish forcefully pulled out of water onto land. My glazed eyes met serenely with the gray sky; they sat devoid of any emotion or thought. My mind moved sluggishly, and yet the world seemed to slow down around me as well, as if to say it’s final goodbye.

'Huh,' I thought to myself. 'It wasn’t a truck, so I probably have no chance of making it through this to another life, I guess.'

As if my body was accepting the end for me with that thought, it lost all muscle control, and my head flopped limply to the side. Although my vision was darkening, and the cold was creeping in, my eyes locked onto the red object crammed around a telephone pole. The girl had crashed her car, possibly because she was bleeding out of several cuts where the glass had gotten her. The shattered phone was barely noticeable on the hood of the car; it must have ended up there after she finally lost her death grip when her car hit the pole. My vision finally reached a point where everything was too fuzzy to make out clearly. A bright light seemed to flash from where the girl had been, dragging upwards.

I knew what it was, and my mind automatically reacted to the golden light. 'No, hers should be going out, right? Why is it doing that?'

I couldn’t see that my own light around my body was doing much the same, yet mine had almost already completed. I remembered what I had promised Christy. Something like regret filled my body’s heart, but I was too gone to feel it. 'I’m sorry.'

T he last of the light left Luke Hunter’s body, revealing a scene as dull as the sky hidden behind the basking light from the soul as it traveled upwards, flying away determinedly.