Have you ever wondered what it would be like to die?
Cedric blinked rapidly, fighting his delirium. Achromic light splashed against the walls, dancing across the peeling butterscotch paint. The TV flashed again as static played leapfrog with the world news. A man stood alone on set. His desk, strewn with loose paper, sat in front of him. His eyes were wild, bulging and darting around. Sweat cascaded down his face in waves, disappearing into the thick material of his suit. He tugged at his collar as if trying to tear it off, before turning back to the camera as if he forgot for a moment that it was there. His chin bent forward as his lips curled inwards to nothing, tears welling in his eyes. Assiduously, he found his words, clinging to them as he shouted dire warnings into the microphone.
Even for all this, Cedric couldn't bring himself to listen anymore. On screen, the news anchor passed out, falling into the desk and slamming his face against the hardwood. His body fell back, hidden behind the angle of the camera. Several people ran onto the scene and pulled him off set. Cedric didn't notice this though, as his attention turned to his hands. They felt clammy and pale, their color belying his natural skin tone. His fingers also seemed longer than usual, bending and arching between themselves as he begged internally for everything to go back to the monotony and ordinary of everyday life.
Across from the TV, a tapestry hung slack on the wall, its many tassels draping along at uneven intervals. The top left corner had fallen away, drooping over the interstellar display of Jupiter and Ganymede. A year ago, he thought. Just a year ago he won the tapestry in a high school sales competition. The kind where the students are supposed to sell overpriced chocolate bars to neighbors, friends, and family— cashing in on familial obligation— or just buying them yourself, like he did, all so you can get a knick knack or accessory that costs twelve dollars at Walmart.
He sighed. Everything was so different then. Simple. Happy. Taken for granted.
A muffled sob stole his attention across the worn beige carpet. A woman held her face in her hands, large wails stabbing through her fingers and clawing their way deep into his ears. It was not a sound he was used to hearing. In fact, he didn’t think he'd ever seen Ms. Judie cry. When she noticed him looking at her, she fought her tempestuous emotions, tried to smile, and failed. Then, more tears.
A fresh news anchor appeared on screen. He, too, had eyes burned red and tears streaking down his face. He sat down in front of the desk and stared emptily at the floor somewhere in the room. He gathered some of the loose papers together into a stack before looking up at the camera.
Suddenly, a brisk coldness gripped Cedric's hands. Ms. Judie leaned forward, her arms wrapping around him in a cold embrace. He smiled, nestling his head between her neck and shoulder. Her shoulder was a little more cushioned than most, offering a comfy space to those melancholic, like him, or the students in her class.
“I'm really proud of you, you know?”
Cedric flinched, and after a moment, nodded. She'd only said it a dozen times over the last few days. At first, he’d argued, but she persisted. Just what you'd expect from a teacher. After his parents passed a few years ago, she took Cedric in, even though he hadn't been in her class for over three years. Foster mom was the correct term, but he still saw her as his teacher. He liked it better that way. She pulled away, flashing her best attempt at a smile. Cedric wondered if his face looked as goofy as hers: a toothy grin with glistening cheeks; red, puffy eyes; and a snot trail sliding over her upper lip. Without thinking, he chuckled, and then caught himself.
“What?” She asked, eyeing him.
He paused. “It's nothing.”
“No, I want to know,” she said, some light returning to her eyes.
“It's just…your face. It looks funny.”
“That’s mean.”
“Hey, you asked.”
There was a moment of silence until—
“Get over here!” she yelled, lunging at him. She scooped his head under her arm and toppled them over, running her closed fist across the top of his head. He grunted, throwing her weight away, regaining his freedom and sprawling onto the carpet.
“You know…the tapestry does look pretty good,” he said.
If only it would still be there tomorrow. Or this room. Or Ms. Judie. Or…me.
Judie noticed the shift in his face and rested on the floor next to him, their noses to the ceiling. She struggled, swimming through the muddled water of her mind, to find the words, the right thing to say to allay him.
“Hey, it doesn't matter, right? You won’t have to worry about it anymore in a few minutes.”
Cedric turned slowly to look at her. “That’s…nice, I guess.”
A few minutes.
Next to him, Judie cringed at her words.
Hesitantly, he turned back to the television. Only now did Cedric notice that the news anchor had changed. He looked a little green in the face. Below the anchor’s abdomen, right where his crotch was, a clock ticked. But this one didn't count up. No. This one counted down. If he tried hard enough, he could imagine a big shiny ball approaching the ground somewhere in New York. It was Y2K all over again, except this time, it was assuredly imminent. The timer continued to tick, life slipping through his fingers like sand against the beige carpet.
“Meteor…"
"Cataclysm…"
A few words snuck through his defenses, penetrating the haze of his mind. He didn't panic, or jump to his feet screaming profanities or prophetic ravings. The meteor had been creeping towards Earth’s doorstep for a few years now, slowly approaching like an unwanted door-to-door salesman. The PSA only came to the public about six months ago: “There's a meteor large enough to wipe out humanity on its way to Earth and there's nothing we can do about it.”
Cedric sighed and looked around. The apartment had been well lived in. From the flaking paint to the old CRT television, the outdated kitchen with its polka-dotted wallpaper, to the half dozen soccer balls, footballs, and basketballs deflating in the backyard; it had been home.
Matted purple drapes, darkened with time, hung slightly ajar over the window, flitting to and fro, but not even the hopeful midsummer breeze could whisk the dense melancholy from the room. A beam of light streamed through, shining and reflecting off the snow-like dust hanging in the air.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
His backpack, perched against the wall adjacent to the kitchen, contained binders, notebooks, and a pile of unfinished trigonometry homework. His room at the end of the hall stared down the empty hallway as if asking for one last sleepover. The small indents carved into the doorframe at varying heights were a tortuous testament to the passage of time.
He wished he could have said goodbye to Zane one last time. Their phone call three days ago had been wholly useless at relieving the pain in his chest. He wished…he could have finally looked Mallow in the face and told her how he felt. He didn’t even care if she reciprocated anymore. He just felt stupid, knowing he was headed for the grave, his emotions feeling counterfeit.
Cedric’s eyes were still fixated on the carpet as he heard a phrase from the television.
“Two minutes remaining."
* * * * *
Somewhere in an abandoned warehouse, a low snicker echoed. A man, dressed in a yellowing doctor's coat, stretched over an odd grouping of wires, tied together with a mess of electrical tape. Plunging a receiver into an open slot, he giggled.
All around him, as far as he could see, wires danced, criss crossing each other. He carefully extricated himself from the circuited monster and wiped his crusty sleeve against the matted hair stuck to his forehead. He sighed, smiled, frowned, and then giggled again.
It was almost done.
His shirt reeked, and of course it would. Geoffrey couldn’t remember when the last time he'd last changed his clothes and neither did he care. In fact, he could hardly remember when the last time he saw another person was. He’d locked himself in this building nearly seven years ago, only leaving occasionally to talk to the local cows. They didn’t like him.
A sleeping bag surrounded by empty chip bags, a random assortment of take-out containers, and a laptop sat in a nearby corner. A calendar on the wall hung open, displaying the month of June, revealing a pin-up model on her back, legs in the air. Geoffrey smiled whenever he looked at the model. He wasn’t sure why though. Geoffrey shrugged before diving back into the monster, another receiver in his hand. Shimmying between one of the many support beams and an outreached arm of the machine, he looked up. The lights, green and red, spiraling upwards to to the second floor looked akin to a misplaced Christmas decoration.
A NASA sticker stuck strong to the back of his laptop, faded, and half picked off. At some point, he had been an engineer. He vaguely remembered calling himself a NASA employee, but his therapist had told him to quiet down.
Quiet down? No, that’s not right…He paused. Do I have a therapist? He giggled.
Gradually, a sound entered his ears. Talking? He usually had the television turned down to the 1990’s hip hop station, but just for today, he had it on the news. He approached the TV and turned it off, and then immediately tuned it back on again. The timer. He needed the timer. No later did his ears protest again. He ignored it as he stared at the numbers. 1:24. He moved back to his sleeping bag and climbed into it. Wriggling around for a few seconds, he resurfaced, two pieces of something metal in his hands. Waltzing to the main hub of the machine, he threw his hands around, sliding pieces of information around the screen, fastening some together, while others were torn apart to be repurposed elsewhere. Once he appeared to be done, he rubbed his hands together before clicking the two pieces in his hands together. Thunk. It was a remote. Rubber rollers and turn dials dotted the tablet sized contraption. He stared at it and cocked his head aside as he stuck his tongue out. It was unclear what exactly he was doing to the remote; twisting this here and that there and flipping a few switches.
0:56
Geoffrey might have heard the man on screen say one minute, but even if he did, it didn't matter. He was done. That meteor stood no chance, he thought, triumphantly. This herculean task had been his, and his alone. It was about this point that he realized the room had grown darker. He danced, moving his way to the big red button on the main control. Next to it, a browning sticky note had some chicken scratch on it. You did it. Rest easy. Geoffrey didn’t know when the note came into being, but it had been here as long as he could remember. He had spent many hours staring at this note. It made him happy. He knew it wasn’t his handwriting, but whoever wrote it had been nice to him at some point at least. Geoffrey smiled as he swung his arm down, slamming his palm onto the button.
The room had turned nearly black now as the machine finally roared to life. The whole warehouse vibrated in response as a plethora of lights turned on, one by one, followed by the cacophony of beeping and whirring.
0:22
Cackling loudly now, he took off, sprinting through the building. Flinging himself up the stairs to the second floor, and then the third, he nearly threw himself from the window. With his back arched against the sill, he hooked his feet on a few of the loose wires splayed across the floor.
Geoffrey stabbed his hands upwards and stared up at the solid, descending sky, his throat sore and nose bleeding. He was screaming now, howling at the celestial visitor. Tears slid up his forehead as he caught himself before falling out.
0:04
Regardless of whether or not his machine worked, he closed his eyes for the last time on Earth.
* * * * *
A boil rose in Cedric’s throat. A tempest of desire and regret. The human experience is ephemeral; existing only within the confines of ‘the present’. And it’s all relative, of course. To a human, a flea lives an extremely, almost expectedly, short life. And to a great tree, a towering red wood, the human experience might as well be that of a flea. And then, the Earth, in its almighty beauty and perfect haven of life, exists only within a single blink of the universe, and in…one minute, and thirty four seconds, it would most likely be gone. Or, at the very least, humans would be. Aliens from some distant corner of the universe, traveling for hundreds of lifetimes, would stumble across the barren wasteland of this planet and mistake it for any other molten ball of hell, or maybe, by then, life will have resurfaced and bloomed. The idea made him smile. Time will still exist after…all of this. Other opportunities for life. Just as quickly as his smile rose, it disappeared.
It was just too unfair. He wanted to do something. Be something. Was that too much to ask for? For years, he'd dreamed of proving those around him wrong; that he was better than this. He just hadn’t reached his final form yet. One day, he would be an entrepreneur, starting businesses from nothing. It didn’t matter what. It could be electronics with a storefront full of phones and smart watches, or an online business selling trinkets and decor, or maybe even, like, a supermarket. The next Walmart. He could see it now. ‘Cedream World’. He thought for a moment. It’s a work in progress. And then he’d reach down at the old farts who called him trash and kicked him when he was down, and offer them jobs. He’d offer more than they made at their crappy day jobs, and give them no option to refuse. Cedric relished in his reverie, spiritually rubbing his hands together like a robber who had just seen a rich person on the wrong side of town.
Ms. Judie had been the only person to take a chance on him. When his mom and dad died, nobody even looked in his direction. It’s not like he didn’t have people. His aunt and uncle on his dad’s side told him to figure it out. He knew they weren’t exactly rolling in cash, but to not even humor the idea... What a way to make somebody feel meaningless. Ms. Judie had reached out when she had heard about the tragedy. The news article: child orphaned as young couple pass in fiery bus accident. He deserted his life, his friends, his future. His will to go to school and to dream died with his parents, grief becoming his only friend. Well, grief and drugs. Looking back, it wasn’t a time he was proud of.
At some point, Ms. Judie had started crying again, and he pocketed the thought, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be returning to it. Her silvering hair hung in clumps around her covered face. Her wrists looked so frail now. She had always been on the smaller side, but the years were catching up. Cedric pulled her hands away and let them relax down to the floor. Her face scrunched, contorting to surrender an open sob.
He noticed, as his heart fell into his stomach, that the room had started to darken. The sun had disappeared, engulfed by the impending meteor. The ground began to shake as if the world itself anticipated its own demise. Ms. Judie composed herself for their final goodbye, wiping away her tears. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is different. It was just another night. They smiled as if they had just finished eating taco night, the credits of a cheesy rom-com rolled on screen.
Twenty-five seconds.
The room continued to dim until Cedric's eyes had to adjust. He leaned forward and rested his head against hers. He didn't want to lose her in the darkness. The pressure against his forehead felt nice, comforting. He couldn't put into words why.
Twelve seconds left.
Ms. Judie closed her eyes tight, preparing for the end. To be honest, he kind of wanted to see what it looked like, the Earth obliterating under his feet, but in the end he decided to close his as well.
“I love you,” he said.
She sniffled. “Always. I'll see you on the other side.”
Cedric nodded hopefully, gripping her hands again.
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