Muttering to himself as he sat alone in a half-lit room, Henry’s tongue stumbled over the syllables to a phrase he had begun to repeat to himself as the days wore on

“When the time for words has passed, action is all that remains”

He was holding a pistol with one round loaded in the magazine in his left hand, slightly drooping toward the floor. The barrel of the small-caliber firearm was pointed at the wooden floorboards he would not hesitate to structurally damage or render the canvas to a scene others would rather not endure. No, he was not hesitating on account of those who would clean up the mess he was contemplating the creation of. The words on his mind were his own, and they had no thoughts to spare of others. His family had surely long-forgotten him by now. This was a time where all words he could repeat to break the silence would swiftly fade back into the background noise ringing louder each second in his ears. There were not a huge number of people around, given his neighborhood's relatively sparse population, but the sound of car engines and chattering could nonetheless be heard from outside his window.

Yet he could have no part. Anxiety crimped his lips shut and stained the pits of his shirt in cold sweat if he so much as considered going out into public. This made everything but the most mundane of activities extremely difficult, but a hoodie and a now somewhat-common mask gave him just enough confidence to mumble loud enough to make others give up on trying to converse with him rather than judging him a mute.

These years had closed his heart to even the most simple of hopes. Love was far out of reach and had fallen out of his mind many years ago, yet in this moment it was at last present again. Henry laughed softly to himself, chuckling slowly as his sanity dwindled.

He knew love was impossible. He knew it wouldn’t make things better. He knew he would gain nothing from it. He knew all of this, and yet he could not help but think of it. Almost like life was mocking him, Henry remembered his commitment to himself many years ago now.

“If I’m unable to find happiness, I will end this farce”

It was the only thing that kept him going these long years, and now at last he knew there would be no further hope of change. There was a small glimmer of hope entering the workforce, but now that his life and hobbies were so-long established he understood the futility of attempting to gain any kind of support. 

No, he knew this was a lie. In truth he’d only really ever wanted to kill himself, and had been methodically severing the ties that bound him to the mortal coil since he began to appreciate this fact. It wasn’t that he had any particular desire to go on, to end, to try, to fail, he was just tired of it all. He was tired of coming home after school to abuse or an empty home. He was tired of getting back from work with an understanding that no one was there to greet him. He was tired of being unable to cry despite understanding his feelings full well. His tears had dried up long ago, and now he was writing the epilogue in blood.

There was nothing left to say, his words felt as meaningless as always. He could repeat his favorite phrases as a call-to-arms all he wanted, but hesitation would continue to stay his hand as it always had unless something fundamental changed.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Luckily for him, this was the day before his birthday. In this moment he broke from the trance he had lived in for far too many years. It was a brief moment of clarity that if he lived long enough to remember would stick out clearly in his mind. So much of his life had been intentionally lived on autopilot in an effort to pass just one more year. And then year after year passed, rendering this approach untenable in the understanding that nothing was going to change. He thought back to each of these brief moments he had lived through in the past and came to the understanding that change would require more effort than he was prepared to endure.

It would require an investment in his life that Henry was entirely unwilling to make. Everything he had experienced over these years, all the willful pushing of others away, it was all leading up to this moment. All the lost hopes, all the holes in his memory born of depression and its corresponding long-term loss of self, it all led to this. It summed up to the understanding that change would require undoing everything in his life so far.

No, not only this, it would require luck and a monumental amount of hope for the future. Henry was simply unprepared for such a thing. Above all, he feared what would happen if he tried this and it still failed. Living life in a haze, a trance, a full-headed acknowledgement that the thing beating in his chest was a dead mass bringing life to a worthless dream more akin to a nightmare than anything others would call life, had at last become too much. In this moment the weight of long decades spent alone and in the preparation for death had at last become felt, and it was more than he could bear.

Henry slowly raised the gun to his head, laughter having long fallen silent. With no further fan-fare or consideration his finger curled inward, and a red-gray mix of color stained the planks of the floor and all-too common drywall of the room.

The next moments didn’t go as he expected. Light didn’t fade from his eyes, instead it brightened. He saw his exploded skull, fragments strewn across the oaken planks of wood below where his feet were once firmly planted. Now they lay straight across the ground, splayed out in the same uncontrolled fashion as the rest of his uncontrolled body had fallen into upon letting go. This sight should have been startling, liberating, freeing. The worries and concerns were supposed to be gone, and yet what was this? A feeling of dread had settled into Henry’s absent stomach. It rumbled in a facsimile of hunger, and yet he was aware there should be none. This feeling of hunger was not for food, nor even for meaning, it was merely a choice of phrase taken in the absence of a reasonable way to express this sensation of absolute futility now spreading from his lower abdomen all throughout his chest and legs.

It set him on fire. He was burning. It had started in Henry’s stomach, but now the sensation of burning death splayed out in convulsions all throughout his appendages in the same violent manner as he had just fallen to the ground. And yet he was unable to fall despite this pain. 

Death had been quiet, quick, painless, and yet what came after was the single most painful experience he had ever known. He had swallowed fifteen bullets made of fire. He had been stabbed eighteen times in the gut, arms, legs, chest, face, fingers. Yet he continued to rise. Light continued to build up in the room as though the fabric of his soul was ablaze. He could no longer see the plain furniture of the room. In the last moments before death Henry’s eyes had been unfocused, and yet he would forever remember the sight of the chair across from him neatly tucked away in front of a small desk in the room. It was no longer visible. Not the chair, the bed, the curtains, the body, the blood. It was all gone.