But then, I opened my eyes.

Was I dead? Or had it all been a nightmare? White light filled my vision. I squinted my eyes to force them to focus. The tops of trees. The forest was real. The centipede?

I tried to sit up, but the pain caught up to me. I grunted as my head hit the ground. The pain. My hand? I turned my head. My hand was still there. No sign of a gash or exposed bones. It was normal size too. Had it really all just been a nightmare? But it was so vivid. I shivered just thinking about it.

Crunch.

Crunch?

I looked toward the sound. My eyes widened. Some sort of giant dog-like creature crunching bones in its mouth. It sat just feet away from my… spine. My lower body was gone. Wait, that was my lower body. Over there, in that creature’s maw. I blacked out.

I woke up covered in a pile of dirt and brush. I managed to dig myself out with only a mild ache in my body remaining. Pulling myself to my feet, I… Feet?

Yep, feet. That was odd. More nightmares? Hallucinations? Yes, maybe the venom was causing me to hallucinate. I sat down to examine myself. Not a mark on me. Skin as smooth as a baby. That was strange. Even before the bite, I should have been covered with a bunch of scrapes and cuts on my legs. Retro-active hallucinations? Venom that works backward through time? Maybe the venom caused my depression. Enough joking. It must have all been a nightmare. Yes, the bridge, the beach, the forest, the centipede, the dog. All products of my twisted imagination. I nodded. And now I was in an strange forest with my clothes torn to pieces and not a mark on me. Heck, I wasn’t even wearing pants. Must still be in a nightmare. Time to wake up and kill myself.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

But how do I wake up? Normally I could just will myself out of my dreams. Pinching myself didn’t seem to work. Dying didn’t seem to wake me up either. I must have died two… no, three times already.

So what do I do then? I couldn’t even kill myself in this twisted nightmare. That was like, my one hope of escape. The idea of killing myself eventually had been the only thing keeping me going the past few years, and now that was taken away from me.

I curled up into a ball, existential dread wrapping its cold fingers around me. Ah, I was going to die over and over and over again, wasn’t I? The nice thing about dying was supposed to be that it only happens once. If you die but continue living then that defeats the purpose doesn’t it?

A rustle in the bushes. I flinched, turning my head slowly. It was that dog thing. Not again, please. I… I don’t want to die any more!

I mean I did still want to die, but I didn’t want to die again. Make sense?

Thankfully, it passed. I let out the breath I had been holding. I needed to get out of here. This was still its territory. It had buried me in that brush pile so it could come back to me later and eat me more. I didn’t want to let that happen, for obvious reasons.

Slowly and calmly, I snuck out of there. Breaking into a mad dash as soon as I felt I could do so without alerting the bloody beast. I mean I was probably alerting dozens of other things in the forest, but hopefully it was just friendly things like bunnies and deer. Right now I just wanted to get as far away from that dog thing as I could. My bones are not chew toys, dammit!

Suddenly the forest gave way to open air. Not looking where I was going, I ran off a cliff. Ah, the familiar feeling of falling. The rocks below rushed toward me, and I was embraced by an enveloping darkness.