Out of the Black - Lee Doty [33]
Tempting. Except that she thought it more likely that he'd be the one eating. Sure enough, she looked again and noticed that the fangs were back, and the mouth was split impossibly wide. Something dark and wet crawled up from his throat and peeked at her from behind his teeth.
"I've got something to share with you." He said in a voice like a warped record.
Her scream faded as her eyes opened to reveal a strange landscape of cloth. Shaky hands pushed out and she rose painfully away from the bed. The familiar room was dim yellow, the pain was hot orange. She tried to turn her head to look about, but her neck felt like it was in a vibrating iron cast. The world shook- no, it was her- every muscle was knotted with uncontrollable cramps, her bones felt like bows bent at the ready.
She'd escaped death on the street only to die in her own bed, she thought as her tenuous control of her arms faltered, and she landed back onto her bed. She shivered and convulsed there for an unbearable, immeasurable time. She felt like her muscles would split under the strain, but she couldn't make them relax.
Was this it? You know, the big "it". Anne didn't believe in heaven or hell, but for the first time it occurred to her that it didn't matter at all what she believed, it only mattered what really was.
She considered the complete dearth of useful information that she had used to arrive at her beliefs on the subject. If the afterlife was an eternal hellscape filled with torture and tax preparation, it didn't matter if she believed in reincarnation or paradise. She was transfixed by dark resonant epiphany: what she believed was not a get-out-of-jail-free card for wherever she ended up when these convulsions finally ate the last life from her body.
Looking back, she guessed that she had been living dead for so long that she had just assumed that being really dead would be more of the same grindingly humiliating thing. Now though, standing on death's rickety po, the afterlife (if there were such a thing) seemed a lot less subjective and a lot more unknown.
Sure, now she thought of this. What's after this? The question was an abyss above which she dangled. What's next?
It might have been minutes or hours before she slipped into oblivion.
***
When she moved, it hurt. If she didn't move, it just threatened to hurt. As she became more aware, this constant threat became unbearable in a Chinese water torture sort of way and she began to shift and fidget. Though this did hurt at first, it slowly became a manageable thing.
For the second time in the last day, Anne was surprised to be alive. Her second brush with death had left her feeling hopelessly alone, powerless, and just a bit hungry.
The bed beneath her was wet. The damp, tangled sheets clung to her as she moved. Her entire body tingled. Her mouth tasted like zombie brain crap. With great effort, she rolled onto her back, and from there she sat up on the bed. The room swam for a few seconds before the wave of disorientation receded.
The room beyond the bed was cluttered, small, and only partially lit by yellow light coming from an over-ornate desk lamp her stepfather had given her for her sixteenth birthday. A veneered shelf held her collection of old hardcopy books. A mismatched dresser held her clothes and was topped with an accretion of trinkets and memorabilia- crystal figurines, perfume bottles, framed pictures of cousins.
She had mixed feelings about her home. It was comfortable and familiar and entirely hers. Sometimes when she arrived here after a hard day's work, she felt independent and secure, the queen of her small domain.
But hers was a palace of isolation, a home of slow warping separation. Sometimes as the hours ground by, she would run out to the store, any store. Sometimes she bought a toothbrush or socks, other times she simply loitered. She'd walk aimlessly through aisles of products, buying only distraction, feeling like a vagrant