Mark’s body snickered, slowly building into a giggle without stopping. A mounting pressure bore internally on Mark as he convulsed for breath, while his body manically cackled unrestrained. Just before he desperately gasped for air, he suddenly puked and gagged on vile. Still inhaling, he choked on the sickly-sweet vomit scent. A nauseating ray of sunlight invaded his abode through his elegant but useless curtains, warming up the vomit and causing the smell to waft out, like an extravagant vomit candle.

‘Stupid fucking curtains.’

He felt a giggle begin to overtake him again.

After the sun went down, he collected himself off the previously expensive stained carpet, leaving rivets of sweat mixing with the remaining dry vomit that refused to seep in further. He glanced down at himself, embarrassed at the lack of shirt covering his scarred burning sides left from his nails.

Mark remarked, “Those drugs were a hell of a drug.” He barely restrained a snicker before biting down on his dried lips, exposing his dried mouth to a new palette of blood combined with the sweat, vomit, hard alcohol, and an acidic aftertaste of the shell around the bupropion.

He painfully lifted his gaze and tried to push himself up but fell on his back. Mark reached into his pockets and picked up a phone to try again. He dialed in the helpline for the third time, and as you know, third times the charm.

After waiting for three minutes, accented with the occasional chuckle ripping through him, someone picked up the line. A young, bored voice droned their scripted response directing him to helpful resources. Mark tried to interject, but a laugh snuck out of him. Predictably, the caller clucked in disgust before the call dropped.

Ironically, this was the best he felt in weeks. Usually, he wouldn’t have the motivation to kill himself, but the antidepressants did, indeed, work wonders. He drearily went for round two before picking up a text from his older, successful, mature, fucking stupid, brilliant sister.

“dont do something stupid”

That was a couple of hours ago after he called her late last night, right into voicemail.

“Think about Mom & Dad. u want to hurt them?”

Funny enough, but with another two swigs from the nearly empty Kentucky whisky bottle, the text almost didn’t hurt. He killed the bottle off with a cheer and dragged himself to the bathroom, leaving vomit footprints. That made him grin, like a murder scene but somehow grosser – even taking his body out of the picture.

He stopped at the bathroom mirror. Boring brown hair, boring brown eyes, interesting-but-for-the-wrong-reasons physique, boring short stature. He viewed himself as an unconventionally attractive individual who needed to meet the right person, which is to say, someone with a severe and early onset of presbyopia.

Which is to say, pretty ugly. Funny oxymoron, that.

Reaching out for the shower handle, he turned on the warm water. While waiting, he proceeded to shave carefully. He brushed his teeth and rinsed with mouth wash. He thought for a second and spat it out. Finally, taking out one container, tucked next to some random print out of a stranger’s dog and some remaining cash, he stepped into the bathtub where the shower was running warm.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

He swallowed the pentobarbital dose and reached for his body wash before the world faded black.

‘Of course, I fuck up. Drove six hours to Mexico to some vet store, drove back, and the damn thing was so effective it knocked me out.’

He contemplated, for what seemed like a moment.

‘I sure hope it’s not the Christian one.’

He paused. The world was still shifting, but far from changing colors, it was moving. As if the world cycled between reforming itself and proceeding to burst again like an overzealous zit committed to an unending battle. The cycle abruptly ended with a note of satisfaction.

‘At least someone’s satisfied.’

A gentle pressure popped open, and a color flashed for a second, showing a dark, bloody zit-like hue before being overtaken by a cerulean sky.

Mark blinked at the sudden beauty. The haze lifted before him, and on second glance, that sky was awfully turbulent, with waves flicking bright white droplets of ocean-like spray. The atmosphere also seemed to approach him rapidly. Also, upon a quick examination, he did not appear to be suspended on any surface.

Mark slowly recognized the anomalies and, with delirious satisfaction, concluded that he was over a body of water rapidly accelerating. He proceeded to strategically resolve his dilemma of an accelerating descent followed by the more concerning decelerating landing.

He screamed a violent epithet before the cold ocean water swallowed his cry. His landing splashed the ocean spray far into the sky, some landing on a nearby jagged edge of a rocky spike sticking outwards.

A second later, absolutely nothing happened.

Five seconds later, on the other hand, a bleeding face popped up with the dark bloodshot eyes finally snapping open for the first time in days. Mark tried to inhale, right as the ocean turbulence proceeded to smack him back down. Mark emerged again, gasping, nearly threatened to hurl by his stomach. He quickly glanced to a shoreline and instead found only a couple of sharp coral-like rocks sticking out entirely inconspicuously.

Still gasping, he ineffectively kicked his way to one cropping with each wave offsetting his progress. He persisted regardless, drawing close to the structure. The structure appeared as a rough purple looking coral spike that stretched out two meters above the ocean line supported by a submerged base composed of the same material.

‘How have the waves not worn down these spikes?’

His survival part of the mind that had conspicuously been absent earlier that day immediately shut that thought down for two reasons: one, he was in an ocean with absolutely nothing in sight other than some coral, and two, he was in a god damned ocean, with absolutely nothing in sight other than that coral, and he would be happy with it.

Mark reached that rock and tentatively grabbed its rough edges before a wave knocked him forward, scratching his hand against the edges, which suddenly flared up. Still disoriented, Mark hugged the coral spike before being met with a gooey feeling where his hand scratched the edge.

He quickly tried to inspect the squishy feeling, but his right arm would not move. Uncertain, he slowly shifted his gaze at some of the other rocks, noticing new movements, primarily towards his direction. His survival instinct, which initially led him to the brief respite offered by the rocks, back-peddled.

‘Rocks shouldn’t move. That rock is moving. You’re getting great practice at spotting anomalies.’

Another such spike, this one suggestively tinted blood-red, approached remarkably quickly until it settled just two arms-length away. With his adrenaline threatening to finish him with a heart attack, Mark stared with wide-open eyes as he saw a massive claw extend under the surface before being met by an equal and opposing giant claw emanating below the spike’s base.

Scratch that, the opposing claw entity seemed superior as it flipped the base, Mark glued onto the spike, and Mark’s stomach into the ocean. In between the streaming air bubbles, his wide-open eyes witnessed an upside-down mammoth crab-face bobbing below the surface, revealing the base’s identity. His survival instinct, remarkably, seemed to have run away, leaving only his personality behind.

‘What’s with evolution and crabs?’

As Mark was to continue calmly rejecting reality, a piercing pain through his chest overtook him. He panicked as if to respond to a heart attack before finding the end of a long-jagged spear smeared with his heart.

‘At least not a heart attack.’