It was the same every time:

He drank a bottle of whiskey and shot himself in the head. The bullet bounced off his temple and landed somewhere across the room with a neutered clink. There was no pain. No blood. The gun went back on the table.

Twice a day.

For seven fucking years.

The same every time.

#

The day before it all started was no different.

He sat at the slanted linoleum table—crowded with empty bottles and crumpled plastic bags—hail pebbling his trailer’s aluminum roof, brown light bleeding through the misshapen slits in the scuffed, plastic blinds. The whisper of bugs and rodents from the heaps of dirty laundry in the trailer’s dark corners was the only sign that he was not completely alone.

He used his father’s old Smith & Wesson Model 19 revolver. He could parse the moment: The flash from the muzzle, followed by the bullet’s contact with his skin, then a little half-step of silence, then the BANG. The first thousand or so times he didn’t notice the gaps; it all seemed to happen at once, a single phenomenon of light, contact and sound. But once he noticed, it became impossible to ignore. Flash—contact…BANG. Three disparate phenomena. It turned out these intervals were hidden everywhere. It turned out the world was mostly distance. A leaky, vacant place. The speed of light is the speed of causation, he used to tell his AP science students. But those were just words. Benno used to believe in words. Benno used to believe in science.

The bullet left ashy residue on his temple. No hole. No wound. The only pain he’d felt in seven years was the unremitting misery couched deep in the folds of his unreachable brain. And yet he tried—Flash—contact…BANG—as if something might change. As if the Hell that had gripped him for seven years would suddenly relent. As if that’s how Hell worked.

The hail pitched sideways, drumming along the trailer’s thin walls.

Here I am. Here I still am.

He set the revolver back on the table, pulled on his coat, and made the long walk to the liquor store.

#

The television mounted over the register showed a commercial for sleep medication, muted.

“What’s your secret?” Mickey the cashier asked, setting a bottle of Jack Daniels on the counter. “Everyone else who drinks like you either gave it up or died already.”

Benno fished a wad of crumpled cash from his pocket, his hand tremulous. He watched Mickey’s old, blind mother, who sat listless on a stool in front of the cigarette rack, her lips caked with dry spittle, her foggy eyes staring at nothing.

“Saw this thing online,” Mickey went on. “About trees. Turns out they’ve been around for, like, millions of years.”

“Hundreds of millions.” Benno said, his voice hoarse from disuse, his stomach shuddering at the terrible implications of such a staggering timescale.

“Yeah. Well, apparently, back when trees first appeared, there was nothing around to eat them.” Mickey made a falling motion with his forearm. “Like when they fell. Animals and stuff didn’t have the… what’s it called?”

“Enzymes.”

“Right. To digest trees. So back then, when a tree fell, it didn’t rot or anything. It didn’t change or go anywhere. It just laid on the ground forever.” The register clanged open.

Benno ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth.

Mickey slammed the register shut. “I mean, look at you, man. You look the same as you did the first time you walked in here. What, six years ago? Seven? Besides the beard. But no gray, not a wrinkle. So what’s your secret?”

Mickey’s mother swayed slightly on the stool, then stilled.

“I guess it’s just genetic.” Benno forced a weak smile.

Mickey’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah that’s how it is. Sucks for me. All the men in my family die of heart attacks in their forties.”

Lucky, Benno thought, turning for the door, already digging at the plastic on the bottle’s neck with an uncut fingernail.

“What did he say?” Mickey’s mother asked, her voice gruff.

Benno paused.

Mickey sighed. “He didn’t say anything, Ma.”

Her wiry eyebrows folded over her chalky eyes. “He said lucky.” The stool creaked as she sat forward, one knurled finger pointing vaguely in Benno’s direction. “Lucky. Lucky!”

“Take it easy, Ma.” Mickey’s freckled hand patted his mother’s shoulder. “You’re just a little confused.”

The old woman took a disgruntled breath, fresh spittle gathered on her cracked lips, then lowered her head and closed her eyes.

Mickey turned to Benno, his mouth knotted with embarrassment. “Sorry,” he said. “We’re working on finding the right medication.”

Had Benno accidentally spoken aloud? He was certain he hadn’t. Just a stupid coincidence. “Good luck with that,” he said.

“Thanks, yeah.” Mickey nodded. “See you tomorrow, Benno.”

#

The hail stopped and the clouds dissolved as Benno walked along the shoulder of the narrow dirt road, which essed through the woods toward his trailer. A low, cold sun flirted along the canopy of dead branches, casting long, gangly shapes in the pale light. Something stirred in the thick brush off the roadside, and two orange eyes peered out through a flank of briar. A cat, dark gray and so large that Benno mistook it at first for a cougar. It padded out alongside the brittle grass, then stopped and looked back at him. Benno had never seen it before, despite walking this road every day for seven years. It had a collar from which a flat glass triangle dangled, and in which Benno saw himself reflected. It seemed far too large to be anyone’s pet. As Benno passed, it turned, insouciant, and soughed back into the brush.

Benno drank straight from the bottle. Though he couldn’t get drunk, he could feel the warmth of the whiskey in his throat and stomach, and achieve a vague numbness in his brain. But he couldn’t lose his balance or see double or black out. He couldn’t access euphoria or forgetfulness. No matter how hard he tried. There wasn’t much of a point to it, but there wasn’t much of a point to anything anymore. And how else was he supposed to fill his time? A person needed something to do.

His nearest neighbors were still over a mile from his trailer; the Rogers family lived in a rundown single story prefab on a few acres of hairy land. Jason Rogers’ rusted pickup sat in the driveway, speckled with melting hail. The few toys scattered across the lawn were for a child much younger than Asher, who must’ve been eight or nine by then. Benno had only seen the boy a handful of times over the years. He was small and withdrawn, and kept his eyes—and the bruises beneath them—hidden behind his bangs. Every other time Benno passed the house he heard Jason yelling inside. Today was one of those days.

“You ugly fucking slut! Gimme that fucking phone!”

“Please,” Kathy Rogers implored, her voice thin from years of smoking and whatever else. “Don’t do this in front of him…”

“You baby him!” Jason’s voice broke, and something—a plate perhaps—broke too. “That’s why he cries all the time like a little fucking faggot!”

Benno slowed to a stop on the roadside and listened. He tried to picture Kathy and Asher at that moment. Cowering, perhaps, helpless against the much larger Jason. Maybe Kathy placed herself between her husband and son, to shield the boy from Jason’s wrath. Maybe Jason threw her aside, or seized her by the hair or the throat. Did Kathy fight back? Did Asher? Or did that make things worse? Was it better to go limp, to play dead, mother and son, in the path of the bear? Benno tried to picture them… But their faces were not their own. His mind twisted them into the faces of another boy, another woman… A man like Jason Rogers was the worst kind of man. A man who didn’t appreciate what he had. A man who lavished torment on the most vulnerable and valuable things in his life. How precious a family, how precious even the memory of one.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Benno’s thoughts were interrupted as the prefab’s front door clapped open and Jason Rogers stomped out, his face red, his neck’s veins bulging, clutching his truck’s keys in one calloused fist as his booted feet clomped down the porch steps and crunched over the icy yard. He made it about halfway to his truck before he noticed Benno standing in the road.

“The fuck?” Jason squinted against the low sun.

Benno considered walking off. He also considered rushing forward and taking Jason by his collar, dragging him to the ground, and teaching him what helplessness felt like. This second impulse was so compelling that he took a step forward before it passed.

Jason glared. “What are you doing, creep?”

Benno swigged his whiskey.

“Why don’t you fuck off out of here?” Jason pointed off down the road in the direction of Benno’s trailer.

“I was just passing by,” Benno said.

“Looks more like you’re spying on my family.” Now it was Jason’s turn to step forward, kicking aside a rusty toy truck Asher had long outgrown. He was a big man—a few inches taller than Benno and at least fifty pounds heavier. “You some kind of pervert?” He puffed out his chest, his eyes bent with anger. “Trying to get your ass beat?”

Benno stood slouched, the Jack Daniels dangling from his hand, holding Jason’s stare.

For a long moment, the only sound was Kathy crying inside the prefab.

Jason looked away first. “Mind your own fucking business.” He stomped to his truck.

Benno swigged his whiskey as the truck’s engine gagged to life. It was a cruel world. His heart ached for Kathy and Asher and the terrible things they were forced to endure. But terrible things were happening all the time. There were a million Jason Rogers. It wasn’t Benno’s business and it wasn’t his responsibility. It was a cruel fucking world. That’s just how it was.

He lowered his head and continued toward his trailer as Jason’s truck screeched off down the road in the other direction.

Just through the tree line, the large cat followed Benno like a shadow.

#

He finished the bottle and shot himself again, this time in the roof of his mouth. The bullet bounced around his teeth and gums, bending itself into a raisin-shaped hunk which he spat onto the trailer’s linoleum floor. Chalky gunpowder coated his tongue. He was almost out of ammo, but what was the point in buying more? It was insane to keep trying like this. But it had been insane for seven years. He didn’t know what else to do. He had tried so many ways: Guzzling bleach just made him a little sleepy; Jumping from rooftops left person-shaped craters in the pavement, and crowds of upset spectators; Drowning made him cough; Setting himself on fire left him naked and covered in soot. He’d tried different guns and ammo—rifles and shotguns—with identical, dismaying outcomes. And of course there had been the train… Just thinking about it induced a spike of guilt so violent that he struck the table with his fist, toppling a row of empty bottles. All those people. Making their way home from work or school, simply trying to live their lives. It had been early on, before he’d known just how permanent his situation was. Had he any inkling, he never would’ve lay down on those tracks. He never would’ve interjected himself into other lives, foisted his Hell onto other people. Those poor, poor people… The image of the wreckage—twenty cars coiled alongside the tracks, torn to shreds, flames crackling, black smoke—was seared into his mind. The screams of the injured, the death rattles of the dying. The smell of burning metal and flesh.

But Benno knew a worse smell. A smell no one should ever smell. Iron and raw fat. And something else. Something unnamable.

Drumming on the trailer’s roof. More hail. Benno hauled himself from the table and fished through the junk drawer beside the twin bed until he found his phone. He never used it anymore—he had no one left to call. He plugged it in and stared at his face reflected in its black glass while it came sluggishly to life, then crawled onto the mattress and pulled the oily sheets over his head. He remembered being a child and hiding in bed like this, the blankets tented over him, using a flashlight to read naughty entries from his father’s encyclopedia. Anus. Testicles. Intercourse. Back then he’d needed privacy to indulge his shame. He’d needed darkness and shelter. The same was true now, only the objects of his shame were different.

He scrolled through his photos. He liked the one of the three of them at home on Christmas—his wife’s holiday, since Benno had none—all wearing matching checkered pajamas, his son’s little arms wrapped around Benno’s neck, his legs locked around his abdomen. Climbing the Daddy tree, he called it. They’d bought their son a game console that year. He was so happy he’d cried. It was one of the last times Benno ever saw him cry. All the ways he grew surprised Benno. Those years sped by so blindingly fast. Everyone told him, but nothing prepared him. His wife struggled with it more than he did. She once said that from the moment their son was born, some invisible monster had started dragging him away from her. Benno hadn’t understood. But seven years later—a fallen tree, undigestible—he’d come to know that monster intimately.

He traced their faces with his finger, his pillow damp with tears. Their faces, drawn so close to his eyes and yet locked at a distance he could not cross. He traced his own face, mourning that man, too, who’d had everything, who smiled in front of a Christmas tree, happy—or happy enough—oblivious to what awaited in a future obscured by the monstrous boundaries of time.

#

He dreamed he walked along the dirt road to his trailer. The sky was white. His sneakers scrrrched on the icy ground. A large gray cat plodded ahead of him, its wide paws silent. It looked back at Benno from orange eyes, the glass triangle on its collar reflecting Benno—though it was angled as such that it shouldn’t have. It stopped and crouched over something on the ground. As Benno neared, it stood and bounded off, disappearing into the woods.

Where it had been, a small blue flower grew from the snow, its petals speckled with flecks of ice. Benno knelt and touched it, knowing well it shouldn’t be there, out in this cold. It would die. It should have been dead.

Benno pulled the flower up from the base of its stem. Its long roots came free from the icy pavement and trailed like black thread. Overcome by instinct, he placed it in his mouth, his warm mouth, and chewed. It was bitter. It had been years since he’d eaten food. The roots were sweet and wet. But the flower had barbs on it, and it lodged in his throat when he tried to swallow. He craned his neck and swallowed again, but the flower only wedged deeper.

No matter, he thought. I don’t need to breathe.

The flower wiggled and bulged and blew its own breath from its petals, which worked its way up Benno’s throat and past his tongue and teeth, and a Voice emerged. Not his voice. A genderless, monotone Voice.

SUBJECT LOCUS IDENTIFIED...

REALM CODE: E7H488 DECIMAL 51.

With the Voice unfurled a flood of darkness from Benno's mouth, which engulfed the road and the woods and the sky.

RECALIBRATING SUBJECT LOCUS. NEW REALM CODE: M2D923 DECIMAL 01…

Benno floated in the darkness. Weightless. Bodiless.

INITIALIZING LOCUS RECALIBRATION…

A sound rose up. A whir. Benno tried to open his eyes but he had none. He tried kicking his legs, to roll over, but there were no legs to kick, no body to roll. The whirring swelled and swarmed and crashed like a turbulent wave. The darkness condensed. It felt like being smothered. It felt, perhaps, like dying. Would it stop? Or would it crush him into an ever smaller point, flood the deepest reaches of his mind until he was indistinguishable from it, for the rest of eternity.

A fresh Hell. Why would he expect anything else? His life—his empty, relentless life—was a portrait of misery. It had been that way for seven years, and it would be that way forever more. Only now the prison was smaller. He would not wish it on anyone, and yet was convinced—as the whirring roared and the darkness constricted—that he deserved it. It served him right. How could such a careful punishment be mislaid? There was nothing to do but surrender…

And as he did, the whirring stopped, and he awoke.

#

He sat up slowly. He was accustomed to nightmares, but this one had been so strange, so specific. Maybe the alcohol was finally catching up to him. It was a hopeful thought. He got up and started for the bathroom, wiping the blurriness from his eyes with a shaking hand and squinting into the gray morning light. If enough alcohol could rot his brain, then maybe enough bullets could penetrate his skull, or a jump from a high enough—

“Where am I?” he asked a room he’d never seen before.

Lime-green wallpaper. A coarse, salmon-colored carpet under his bare feet. A single beige chair beside a low beige table in one corner. A television atop a dresser on the far wall. Pink wall-length curtains drawn over a window.

Not his trailer.

He looked back at the bed. A full-sized bed, still made, its nondescript mustard-colored sheets impressed with the vague outline of his body. The sheets had distinct hospital folds at the corners. A drinking glass, upside down on the bedside table. A fire-exit floor plan affixed on the inside of the door.

He was in a motel room. A shitty motel room.

He touched his forehead. How had this happened? He thought back to the night before: He drank, as he always did. He climbed into bed, in his trailer, and fell asleep clutching his phone. He never blacked out from drinking—he wasn’t able. Had he sleepwalked? He had never sleepwalked before. Was he still dreaming? He flexed his toes on the coarse carpet. It was there. He was standing on it.

He crossed to the window and threw back the curtains. The morning light swallowed up his vision and he tented a hand over his eyes.

What is this?

His thoughts stuttered and his mouth fell open.

What…

He lurched forward and vomited warm whiskey onto the salmon-colored carpet, then blinked up through the window from bleary eyes.

In the white sky, an enormous, disembodied heart pulsed and bled. It was five times bigger than a full moon. Its pale, sinewy musculature glistened. The immense openings of its ablated arteries flared and contracted. A torrent of foggy blood rained down from it, disappearing beyond the horizon.

It beat—about once per second—in total silence.

The landscape was otherwise antithetically banal: Simple grassy hills rolling on and on as far as Benno could see. No trees, no plants beside the brittle, yellowish grass, and nothing alive in sight. The white sky, unmarred—whether cloud cover or the atmosphere itself was impossible to say—was vacant save for the giant, ghoulish heart.

Benno staggered back from the window. His own, smaller heart thudded in his chest at three-times the rate of the giant one in the sky.

Is this it?

Benno had spent so much time imagining death. For the sake of his wife and son he hoped for heaven—but knew deep down that death was an endless expanse of nothingness. Or was it a cheap motel and a monstrous, floating heart? Were the last seven years purgatory, and this, now, somehow, finally, his ultimate fate?

A wordless, winding sob escaped his mouth.

Is this it?

He collapsed to his knees. Were his wife and son here, too? The thought of them in this place—trapped beneath this colossal, bleeding heart—filled Benno’s chest with new dimensions of grief. And yet even worse, he knew they were not. He was alone. He would always be alone.

Another sob boiled up from him, and he covered his face with his hands.