Bee’s life followed a single monotonous routine.

Wake up. Run. Eat. Work. Run. Eat. Work out. Eat. Sleep.

She talked to people at work, or with her mom when she called to check up on her. Other than that, she lived an utterly solitary life, and followed the routine to the letter.

It wasn’t like it was on purpose. She hadn’t planned her life out that way. It just happened. She didn’t think to do anything else.

Wake up. Run. Eat. Work. Run. Eat. Work out. Eat. Sleep.

Three times a week, she substituted her second run for a BJJ training session. The only other modification to the routine was every Friday, when she visited the graveyard after work. To see him.

It was Friday. She sat cross-legged in the grass. She lit a cigarette and propped it up against the grave, then lit another for herself. Some old lady on her left glared at her, and she glared right back until the pensioner scoffed and hobbled away.

Bee returned her attention to the grave, a plain gray slab with a simple epitaph.

William Dahl. In loving memory.

Coming here always made her feel sick to her stomach. There was no comfort. No closure. Just a slow poison stewing in her belly. At this point, it was a way to torture herself more than anything. His memory was a festering wound she couldn’t stop picking at.

Smoking was the one bad habit she’d kept up with. Ironically, she had always gotten mad at Will about it. It was only after he died that she’d gotten into it. Maybe to feel some sort of connection. Maybe because the smell reminded her of him.

It tasted like shit.

Just like everything else.

“I don’t even know what to say to you anymore,” she said with a smoky sigh. “I feel like I ran out of words years ago.”

It would be exactly five years tomorrow.

After some time, she found the words to continue. “You know, I hate you, actually. You screwed me over so bad, you know that?”

The grave had no face, but she felt like it was staring back at her in silent judgment.

“You weren’t even that handsome. Or funny. Or strong. Or smart. Well, I guess you were smart. But you weren’t that special. You were kind of fucking weird, actually.” She took another long drag of her cigarette and pondered the sky while she exhaled. “So why did you take all the colors with you when you left?”

The gravestone was silent as… a stone. It had no answers for her.

Bee drew up her knees to her chest and put her head in her hands, cigarette pinched between two fingers. “I didn’t even get to say it. You just left. So what am I supposed to say now, huh?”

She drew a pair of crude eyes in ash on the gravestone so she could feel like she was having a proper conversation.

“You’ve got me going again,” she said with a bitter laugh, looking at her pretend friend in his blank, wonky little eyes. “You must be sick of hearing this by now. I’ve said it all before a thousand times. Just chewing on the same words, over and over.”

She looked up, chewing on her lip. “I’ve, uh… Made a decision. I won’t be here next week.”

The gravestone looked back at her with a face of shock and betrayal. Maybe. She made a face at it.

Bee sat there a while longer, finished Will’s cigarette when she was done with her own. The words stopped coming.

“I hate you,” she said as she stood up, wiping down the backs of her legs. Then, after a brief hesitation, she added: “I love you.”

She wiped off the ashy eyes before she left and made sure to dispose of the cigarette butts responsibly. She wasn’t an animal, after all.

*****

Bee jogged back to her apartment and heated up one of the meals she had prepped the day before. The same as every day. Chicken, rice, broccoli, spinach. It tasted like nothing. There were better ways to prepare it, but she didn’t bother with it. It didn’t matter.

She stared at the ugly, off-beige wall on the other side of the table, studying its dull imperfections with exacting closeness. She ate with one hand and worked a squeaky wrist trainer with the other.

Why do I train? she asked herself. What am I waiting for?

Her mother called. Bee dreaded picking up, but eventually did. She immediately started talking at her. Something something, was she eating enough? Something something, did she have a boyfriend yet? Something something, when would she come visit?

Bee answered most of the questions with non-committal grunts and replied to the last one with ‘soon’.

Once her mother had exhausted all her general conversation topics as well as the incredibly riveting rumors and goings-on in their small town, they finally said their goodbyes.

“I love you,” Bee said in parting, feeling a little bad for taking out her sour mood on her mother. “And… I’m sorry. Goodbye.”

After her meal, she rested for an hour before heading to the gym. It was a small, run-down place. The equipment was substandard, but that was all right. She liked it because hardly anyone went there.

She did her stretches. Almost the moment she sat down at one of the machines, a man approached her, wiping his face with a towel and slinging it over his shoulder. She vaguely recognized him. He was one of the few other regulars.

“Hi,” he said. “I see you around here a lot, huh?”

“Yeah,” Bee replied. “Probably.”

“You’ve got good form.”

“Thank you.”

“So, uh… I actually wanted to ask—”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“No, thank you.”

The man backed away a step, a sheepish look on his face. “Oh, okay! Sorry. I guess you knew what I was going to ask, huh? And, uh, I don’t—”

“I appreciate it. Goodbye.”

He blinked, looked like he was going to say something else, then turned stiffly and walked away.

Bee went on with her workout.

She stared up at the fluorescent light tubes in the ceiling when she did her bench press. Too bright. Burned her eyes.

Why do I train? she kept asking herself. What’s the reason?

She was barely conscious of her body’s movements while that thought repeated endlessly. Everything was happening somewhere outside of her; pushing and pulling, straining herself red-faced on pure, rote instinct.

Why?

But she already knew the answer.

There was no reason at all. It was just inertia. She followed her routine, did what she did, only because she hadn’t found a good reason to stop.

She had completely lost track of time. By the time she came out of her train of thought, she was a sweaty, staggering mess. Luckily it was late, and she was the last one left, so no one saw her rush to the changing room to throw up in a toilet.

Stupid, she thought as she flushed it away. Wasted a meal.

She was shaky and stiff-legged on the walk home. There weren’t many people out on the riverside street at this hour except the occasional passing car on her right. The sky was pitch-black, and the air was pleasantly cool on her overheating body.

Almost time to sleep.

That was her least favorite part of the day. She could never sleep right.

“Help…” came a weak voice somewhere on her left.

Bee stopped to look down the shallow slope that led towards the water. It was too dark to make much out.

“Help me…”

Squinting into the night, Bee eventually made out a roughly human shape just a few meters down from here, sprawled on the ground and limply waving for her attention.

Goddammit, Bee thought. This is not what I need right now.

But she hurried down there, traipsing through the dark, her weary feet catching on loose stones.

“Are you all right?” Bee asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I fell,” the person replied. It was a woman’s voice.

“You… fell?” It couldn’t have been much of a fall, with maybe a ten degree incline—max.

She knelt by the woman and helped her sit. She held her foot out awkwardly, and grasped tightly at Bee’s shoulder.

“Are you all right to stand?” Bee asked. “I can get you to the road and we’ll call you an ambulance or a family member or something.”

“Yes, I-I think so.”

Bee helped her up, and the woman leaned on her to take weight off her bad foot. Bee half-supported, half-carried her up to the road and set her down on the sidewalk beneath a flickering street light. Her ankle did look twisted at a gross angle, a broken bone tenting the skin.

“Thank you so much, really,” the woman said. She was dressed all dark, and her skin had an unhealthy pallor to it. “I feel so embarrassed.”

“It was no trouble,” Bee said automatically, since it was the sort of thing people said in situations like this. “Accidents can happen to anyone.”

Even though she still couldn’t understand how the woman had managed to hurt herself that badly. Had she thrown herself down there on purpose or something?

Bee stood back, hands on hips, and waited. The woman looked up at her with a gentle smile. Her eyes were a strange color. Yellow, like a cat’s.

“So?” Bee asked.

“So, what?”

“Aren’t you going to call someone? Did you lose your phone down there?”

“Oh. No, I have it.”

“Would you like me to do it?”

“That’s okay.”

“Right. Then…”

“I’ll call someone. But first, could you do just one more thing for me?”

“Uh, I guess. What is it?”

“Look up.”

Bee looked up.

There was a rope dangling from the light post.

A noose slipped around her neck, and she just managed to get three fingers around the loop before it pulled tight. The rope coiled around the horizontal part of the lamp, moving on its own accord like a great snake. Bee was forced onto her tiptoes, croaking as she struggled for breath.

“Thank you, you’ve been so helpful,” the woman said, snapping her ankle back into place with a sharp tug and jumping to her feet. “Now, I did go through the trouble of planning this whole elaborate thing, instead of, I dunno, killing you in the night—boring—so if you’d do me one last favor and die slowly so I get to enjoy it, that’d be just the best.”

Bee was lifted into the air, tugging at the rope with both her free hand and the one pinned against her throat, but finding no success with either. She kicked her feet in panic and frustration and some desperate desire that she would suddenly find ground beneath her feet. She didn’t.

“Ooh, that’s good! I like all that wriggling you’re doing—so candid! Keep going!”

Bee’s vision was already starting to tunnel, blood whooshing in her ears. She sucked for air, but her throat was mangled closed, and not a sliver of blessed oxygen passed through.

It felt a little like being put in a rear naked choke, except with the sudden certainty of death looming over her. She understood none of what was happening, but that much was clear.

I’m going to die.

Then, in the drawn-out moment before passing out, she felt a sudden rush of clarity. She swung both legs forward, then back. Forward, then back. Working up momentum.

“Woah!” the woman called out. “Easy there, jungle woman. Don’t need to go that far.”

Bee kept going, could hardly feel the movement through the numbing of her body. She kept going until everything went black.

Then something snapped, and suddenly she was on the ground, hacking and coughing and sucking in sharp breaths, offering some relief to her aching lungs. She worked the noose out from around her neck and tossed it aside, staggering to her feet. Everything was still blurry, but there was no mistaking the silhouette in front of her.

“What the fuck…” she croaked, rubbing at her neck with one hand, the fingers of the other rubbed raw and thumping.

Bee took a step towards the woman. “I’m gonna—”

She was interrupted when something sharp slid into her throat. Her next breath was filled with hot blood. It bubbled out of her mouth and trickled down the front of her shirt.

“You really went for it, sweetie,” the woman said, her voice warped and faraway, like an echo at the end of a long hallway. “That was even more fun than I expected. But let’s not ruin everyone’s hard work, okay?”

The knife was pulled away, and Bee felt the blood surge anew, spurting from her in a jerky stream. She couldn’t breathe. It was already in her lungs. Drowning. Dying. She went down on one knee, trying to get air but only managing a weak retch.

The knife slid into her again. Shoulder. Stomach. Armpit. Between the ribs. Each time it hurt less, until it was just a little poke.

Bee did not feel herself hit the ground. But she found herself staring up at the black sky, with the harsh street light flickering down at her. Too bright.

She couldn’t move.

Why did I train?

What was the point?

Her eyes fell shut, and she felt nothing but relief.

*****

Bee opened her eyes. For some reason she couldn’t quite recall, she found that surprising.

She stood on a stone platform a few meters across. Around her were drifting clouds and a gray, dour sky.

A creature of incredible proportions sat before her, a mass of corpulent, pustule-ridden fat rolls squeezed in behind a comparatively tiny desk, its bulk spilling out across its surface. There was a tiny little head on top that stared at her with beady yellow eyes.

The thing smiled through a mess of sharp teeth pointing every which way.

“Congratulations on dying,” he said in a croaky voice, evidently male. It had been hard to tell due to his large, flabby breasts.

Bee looked down at herself. She was clad in all gray. Everything was okay. There was no blood. Should there have been?

The creature, heedless to her confusion, continued. “Let’s get started immediately, shall we?”

Dazed, Bee could not find a reply other than: “Okay?”