The Day I Died

The day I died, my atoms began to slough away, in groups of molecules. Some assisted by bacteria, others by little bugs, still others by the gentle roots of plants, and some simply by the wind that carried them into infinity.

The day I died, a phospholipid that had spent its life in me guarding the lining of my intestines was eaten by a bacterium. It was after the cell had apoptosed and its remains were an offering for those that still carried on.  That bacterium enjoyed the meal greatly, eating sugars with abandon.  

The day I died, a root tickled my nose, asking kindly if I were done with the fluid in my eye. It absorbed my sustenance, feeding it up toward green leaves photosynthesizing above. They enjoyed their drink and offered gratitude in a bright display of petals for the newly sprung spring.

The day I died, a worm cosied up to my lips. There were decaying juices, the last rites of dying cells, and it offered its solemnity in response. It took what was presented and grew stronger and haler. It gave life to ten little eggs which hatched into ten tiny little worms, whose lust for experience could barely be contained by the soil they inhabited.   

The day I died, an epidermal cell was caught by the wind. It danced in the breeze and met dizzying heights. It laughed its way into the upper echelons of the atmosphere where, bit by bit, its pieces were plucked away. Some were precipitated in a drizzle of rain. Some coated the sand of a waving desert. Some were caught in an inhale of expanding lungs.

The day I died, I became a thousand new things. I died, but I lived. 

Bubbles

     The rain fell like an avalanche of stone, a mass of brown-gray beating down the occupants underneath with a fury. My grandmother used to tell me the old stories, which were old even when she was a little girl. They were the stories of a bygone era when scientific explanation were wanting, and we turned to our imagination over experiments. She told me of a woman with long, white curls who rested in a bed of blue. She said her son was the sun. When the sun would hide, the white woman would cry and cry, with big tears of grief thundering on the ground like the daggers through her heart. Sometimes she would scream and shake the world with her flashes of anger at how her son was taken from her.

     It was a much more romantic story than gaseous water condensing on soot particles. Perhaps those times were more romantic. Perhaps ignorance is inherently romantic, and in this era where all our answers came readily to our fingertips, ignorance and its romance had been lost.

     The puddles were slick with oil, refracting the bright, piercing glow of a thousand LED lamps into a dirty rainbow across the brown surface. I had heard that the upper levels of the city were much cleaner, but passes into them were expensive, and I was only to stay here a night, my last night of freedom and perhaps my last night alive. Dirt didn’t bother me.

     I sometimes traced the path that led me here as I stared up into the starless sky while a background concert of grumbling voices, mechanical whirring of vehicles, and gasping generators streamed noiselessly across my ears. It was simple really. There was a war far away, across the expanse of space. The distance could not eclipse its importance. The nobility of the crusade was poured through every media, only matched in quantity by the pressed gray uniforms returned to families instead of the person inside.

     It had happened to the family next door of grandmother and I last week. In another war (or perhaps the same war a decade previous; it was difficult to demarcate the passing of one war to the next) it had happened to my parents. Now, it was my turn to take the gray uniform so it might be returned to my grandmother one day, politely folded.

     It was a warm night. The teardrops of the white woman traced the curvatures of my face tenderly, as if my own mother could see me now and bemoaned by end. It trickled pass the collar of my jacket. It was probably too warm for a jacket, but I kept it on anyway. It marked my fate, but it still smelt of home where I had unpacked it the week before with a note of my calling. My grandmother had taken to washing it carefully, fixing a loose seam at the cuff. It was as if she wished it to be in perfect condition when it returned home without me. Now, it would smell of pollution, with dingy stains across the shoulder from whatever this rain carried with it.

     I should turn myself into the barracks, out of the rain and out of this phantasm of reality, for this moment could not last. It would melt away with the hours, and leave me back toward the specter of death with all my gray-clad comrades. It meant nothing.

I could write a note to my grandmother, although I did not know what I could say. We had spent the last week in silence, for words no longer held any power to my fate. What would happen would happen.

     I did not turn back however, as logic dictated. Instead, a low building with a red, glowing sign and a large corrugated awning welcomed me. The structure was nigh empty and quiet. Although I had never had one before, I suppose now I could use a drink.

     The inside was dimly lit, and the few occupants seemed likewise dim. There seemed a heavy film over everyone and everything, as if some cosmic maid forgot to dust this corner of the universe and had left it to accumulate the grime of life. That is, everyone except one.

     A young woman sat on a barstool. Her hair was an electric blue, her skin a burnt umber. A tribal tattoo wound it’s way around her bicep and another at her thigh, which her short skirt and holey tights allowed vision of, but was almost obscured by her thigh high boots. She had a bright smile, that seemed to light the place more than its faded lamps.

     She did not look up from chatting with the bartender, all smiles and jokes. I went around her to the right, well within the shadows to which I now belonged. My separation from them was temporary, my rejoining impending.

     “At ease, soldier.” I turned. She stood behind me, saluting with a facsimile of a hard frown. She broke into a laugh. “Are you one of the recruits?”

     I nodded. She sat beside me. Her eyes matched her hair. The antihelical fold of her ear had a trio of stars carved out of it so that I could see the blue locks tucked behind it. A silver wire twisted across the rim of her ear.

“How come you guys are always so grim?” she asked.

     “I suppose we know our fate,” I returned quietly.

     “Higgs, get this kid a drink,” she called out, shaking her head. “Where are you from?”

     “Does it matter?” I asked.

     “Um, yeah. You’re not from around here, so that means you’re from somewhere different. Different is cool,” the woman said.

“Amazonia, you know, on Earth,” I said.

     “This your first time outside the planet, soldier?” the woman asked with a smile.

     “My family never had much money,” I explained. 

     “Well then, merde, I should show you around,” the woman said. The drink the woman had ordered for me arrived along with another for her. It was colorless and came in a thin, tall glass.

     “Bottoms up, soldier,” the woman ordered with a smile. I took the glass and she held hers up at the same time. I do not know why, perhaps the belief that nothing I did tonight would matter if my end were so close, but I listened to her.

     I sputtered, coughing. She laughed like lightning, bright and electric. She grabbed my hand, wiping her mouth with the other. “Come on, soldier.” She pulled me away from the bar with my eyes burning. My brain seemed fuzzy in face of such untarnished optimism. It could not object.

     The rain met us. She smiled and let go of my hand for a moment. She spun in it, puddles splashing against her boots and coating them with muck. She seemed abuzz with a strange joy that seemed to have no origin. She looked at me; with radiant teeth exposed, she laughed. The laugh hit me like a physical force, as if her spirit had enraptured my mind.

     She grabbed my hands and spun with me, laughing all the more at my expression. Then, we ran. She pulled me through the streets, past the huddling crowds and faded buildings.

     “Where are we going?” I asked her as we ducked around a signpost.

     “I don’t know!” she replied breathlessly. The exertion cleared my brain of extraneous thoughts.

     We stopped at a fountain, an old fixture from when the city was new. It was no longer working. There was once a green around it, but all that remained was rocks and mud. In this dingy part of the city, no one had taken the time to repair it. I doubted anyone cared when so much of this borough was gray and dirty.

     She sat against the fountain, panting and radiating. Her blue hair seemed luminescent, brightening up the area with impossible light. She was a candle in the dark. She looked at me and laughed.

     “Take off your coat, soldier,” she said. “It’s hot.”

     “I’m not hot,” I lied. Sweat was creeping down my brow, but my earlier assertion to keep my jacket hung on to me. Perhaps I considered it my grandmother’s last gift. Perhaps I had an irrational fear of losing it because of its loss was so closely associated with death. Only death could take it from me. If the woman could see my grim thoughts, she gave no notice. Instead, she batted her bright eyes and laughed.

     “Of course, you’re hot, soldier. Anybody with two eyes can see that,” she smiled. “Hey, what’s that over there?”

     She pointed to an old shop with multicolored lights. She didn’t wait for a response, not that I could provide one. “Come on, soldier. Let’s go see.”

     She grabbed my hand and pulled me over. Inside was a candy shop and gray-haired man with a beard like the candy floss that sat to his right. The shop gleamed with the colors of the rainbow; candies were displayed on archaic wood shelves with great care. The lower shelves were polished with a thousand, tiny, eager fingers, but the upper stood untouched, with dust mites dancing above them in the overhead fluorescent lighting.

There were still children in this dark, dank level of the city, children who so few people cared about that they hadn’t taken the time to repair the fountain in which they could play. But those children had a few that could still care, that would take them to get candy, a momentary diversion from a dark fate.

     “I love cotton candy,” the woman declared. “My dad used to get it for me when I was little. You ever had it, soldier?”

     I shook my head, my dark thoughts scattering with her words and smile. She seemed to flash across the darkness around her like a shooting star. She pulled a cone of candy floss down, swiping her card across the counter.

“The blue matches my hair, don’t you think?” the woman said, pulling the confection close to her head for comparison’s sake. I found words a little awkwardly.

“Almost,” I said. “But, I think your hair is a little brighter.”

She laughed. “You should get the pink!”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I said so, soldier!” she smiled, paying for the second cone of candy floss. She thrust it into one hand and grabbed the other, pulling me impatiently. “Come on.”

Trying to save our confections from the pouring rain, as impossible a task as trying to save the lives of soldiers in war, we ran forward into the night. She laughed as the candy stuck to her fingertips, as brilliant as blood but of an opposite color. Likewise, her expression betrayed the opposite emotion.

She brought us to a stop, as she held her ribs aching with laughter. “You have cotton candy on your face,” she said.

“Where?” I asked. The candy floss had melted in the rain, like I feared my life would soon. I felt upward at my face, trying to find the location of the misplaced sugar. 

“There,” she said, leaning in next to me. She licked my cheek. My brain went numb. I stood stock-still, unsure of how to respond.

“Now, you match your cotton candy,” she laughed. “It’s all wet now though. Come on, soldier!”

She threw our candy flosses away, and pulled me forward into the dank, dark cave of a mall half way through closing down. We ran up the stairs until we reached the atrium. A glass ceiling stood above us, and through it, you could see the glimmering buildings of more prosperous people. It was like the film that dissociated condemned soldiers from reality. It was for those people above that I gave my life.

Absent-mindedly, I took off my soaked jacket and folded it under my arm.

“Did you see the stars back on Earth, soldier?” she asked.

“I did when I was little. I lived way away from the city with my parents. They died though, so my grandma and I had to move back into the city so she could work,” I said. I could picture our perfect little house so clearly in my mind before death had taken its hold over my life. Yet, death was still not done with me.

“Did they sparkle like everyone said? Were they really so bright that they looked like milk spilt across the heavens?” she asked, forgoing the normal apologies people usually offered when hearing the passing of my parents.

“Not quite like milk, but there were a lot of them on clear nights,” I said. Sweet memories made bitter by the fate of their occupants danced across my cerebrum. “My mother knew their names.”

“Names don’t mean squat, do they, soldier?” the woman said. Her eyes sparkled with the understanding she had no desire for my name, and I should expect none from her. She laughed, and stole my jacket from underneath my arm. She placed it over her own shoulders and grabbed my hand. “Come on. There’s more to see.”

We ran out of the building and into the rain once more. She smiled and laughed, as if the rain were a glad song only she could hear. We stopped at a toy cart, and she bought bubbles and a red balloon with a swipe of her card.

She handed me the balloon and spread a ring of bubbles around us as she laughed. The punctuated quickly with the oncoming rain, but it didn’t seem to matter for the woman. She smiled and laughed with the mirth of child a third her age. It was as if the bubbles were filled with hopes and dreams. “Come on, soldier!” 

We left a trail of bubbles as we ran, and as the night passed, the rain lessened then dispersed. The bubbles lasted longer, iridescently refracting light into a thousand tiny rainbows as beautiful and poignant as any artistic masterpiece. They were like will-o-wisps that guided its followers toward dreams. Perhaps they were crafted from the fabric of dreams themselves, like this mysteriously mirthful woman with blue hair.

We found ourselves back in front of the low building with the glowing red sign. She grabbed the balloon from my hand, kissed it once, and then thrust it into the air where we watched its ascent through the high reaching towers into the upper echelons of society. It was like watching a representation of the dream we all dreamed come into reality.

She swept her arms around me and kissed my cheek.  

I was smiling. I did not know when it had happened, but there was a smile I found somewhere in the last few hours that I had thought I lost many years ago.

“This is where I leave you, soldier,” she said.

“What?” I asked. The world closed and narrowed. The possibilities drew back darkly toward the sucking black void of reality. “I thought-.”

She smiled. “You’re beautiful, soldier, and so am I. Sometimes, the most beautiful things are temporary, like bubbles.”

She turned to leave.

“Wait!” I said, running to catch her.

She smiled. “What is it, soldier?”

“My jacket,” I said. She took it off and placed it around my shoulder. With her hands behind my neck, she pressed her lips to mine. They tasted of sugar.

She laughed. She placed her lips to my ear. “Bubbles, soldier,” she whispered. She ran off into the night, still leaving bubbles behind her.

Ordinary Whispers

“It’s me, Sam, again. God, I wish I could hear your voice now. I mean, sometimes I do, in the whispers of ordinary things—a rustle of someone’s sleeve, a breeze through the leaves of that oak on first, even my own breath when it hits the early morning frosty air—but, it’s not really you, you know? It’s just what I have left of you, broken fragments, memories. It’s me, trying to bring you back into my life. It’s me, plastering your facsimile on my world without you. It’s me, alone.

“You’d laugh. God, how’d you laugh at me now. Me, sitting here, spilling words instead of tears like normal people do. You always said that God crossed some wires in my brain, attaching emotions to my hands or my feet or my throat, just not my face. You said you could never see anything in my face, but just by listening to how I walked, you would know. If I was happy or sad or angry, you said I walked just a little differently.

“I was always happy to be with you though, so I guess it was probably pretty easy to tell. At least, I should have always been happy with you. You said I was a grouch, so maybe I wasn’t. But, maybe it was my kind of happy, you know? A grouchy happy. You’d be laughing again. I wish I could hear your laugh. It always rumbled across the room like a giant, golden retriever. It was a pandemic, sending fevers of joy and spasms of mirth into all that heard it.

“God, I need to stop doing this. I know I do, but sometimes, I guess it just hurts, you know? And, I need to talk. I am staring at your coffee mug. I don’t know what to do with it. I mean, it’s yours. I feel like it should make me happy to see it, to remember your silly morning face with your hair skiwampus and your eyes glazed, but you were always smiling. The mug’s yours, so it should be happy. And, sometimes, it does make me happy, for a moment. But afterward, it’s just worse.

“I’m sorry. God, I’m just so sorry. I just can’t let go. I can’t. Every month, you know, the phone bill comes. I see your name. You stare at me through a void of black ink. I can almost see your face, I can almost hear your voice, I can almost feel your lips on my cheek. And, I can’t stop it. I can’t stop that tiny part of you that’s still out there, that’s still alive, because it’s all I have.

“I can’t—Oh God, I just can’t—

“ …I think I still hope you’ll pick up, even though I know you can’t. I guess this is love. You hope when you shouldn’t, when it doesn’t even make sense to hope. And, I love you. I don’t think I even realized how much I loved you, or even what love could do, until you—until you d—… God, I can’t say the word. Can you believe it? Even now, I can’t say it.

“I love you. I hope you knew that. I hope you know it. I love you so much that I sit here and pretend you can hear me talking, that you’ll be there tomorrow morning to listen to your messages and drink a cup of coffee. I love you, and I love all the ordinary whispers I have left of you. I can never let them go.”

Walk in the Dark

I can’t sleep anymore. I close my eyes, and the images flash and blur. There is a sea of bursting, roiling colors that should not mean anything, but does. It represents moments so seared onto my brain, that even the random phosphenes of tired eyes translate into recreated history.

There is so much red. God, my memories drip with it. I can smell it. I can taste it, metallic and bitter, sticking in my mouth because I can’t swallow. I can’t eat. Because, when I do, all I taste is blood, and I think of you. I think of you.

The tinnitus in my ears is always gunfire. I feel as if I should cower on the streets, run from the hail of bullets, because it is always there like it always was before, chasing me for eternity. I’ve learned to pretend to ignore it, to pretend that my past doesn’t now control me, to walk along the sidewalk without taking cover in nearby alleys. My heart still beats with the power of a freight train within my chest. Sometimes, I wonder if people can see it, if they see my sternum jumping up and down in a quick tattoo, if they can see the fear I cannot forget. People don’t though.

I can feel it too. The pain flashes intense and acute at odd moments, from any part of me, as if some long forgotten bullet has finally found its mark. I imagine that it will cause me to join you, but there is never anything actually there, just ghosts. The only pain I know is real is that ache which won’t leave my heart, that makes every moment so hard to breathe in. You took with you something there, something that can never be replaced. I can never be whole without you, and I wonder if life’s worth anything when I feel so broken.

I can’t sleep anymore. I roll back and forth on my bed, trembling and shaking, with a pain too great to express. One time, when my eyes too weak to hold their own, they fluttered to a close, and I dreamt of you before. I had felt nothing like that happiness, that pure and unadulterated bliss in so long. It must have sent a spasm into my brain, forcing me to consciousness once more before I could even savor the moment.

It hurt so much to have had you, even an imagined image of you, in my hands, and to lose you once more.

Is it wrong that I sometimes blame you? For having my heart, then leaving me alone? I know you did not mean it to end this way, in blood and sweat and tears. It is not the future we imagined. We were idealistic idiots, weren’t we? We were just mere children believing in a better future, which would never come. Now, I feel the ages the world pressing down on me like a smother.

Sometimes, I think living will kill me. I don’t know for how much longer I can continue subsisting. Surely, without sating basic physiological needs such as sleep and food, I will die soon, right? I can meet you in death, but we would both be dead, so it is likely that neither of us would know of it. However, if life brings no pleasure, at least death can be a panacea to the pain of living.

You wouldn’t like it though, would you? God, you were always so bright, kind, and impossibly moral. How is it that you’re gone and not I? What kind of messed up god would ever allow that?

You would want me to live. Sometimes, I picture you at my side. I can smell you. I feel your breath on my cheek, your hand on mine. You hold me, like I held you when life fled your perfection. You tell me I should go on, that I’m strong enough to leave this behind when I feel so weak. You tell me that I will learn to walk alone without your bright light, though I may stumble now.

You were always right about everything then, but the distance between us mutes your voice in my head. Sometimes, I think you, at least my imagined representation of you, are wrong. Not enough though that I will stop trying, not yet.

I saw a kid in a park the other day. He had one of the white canes reserved for the blind and glasses around his eyes. It must have happened recently, as each step was hesitant and quiet. His mother hovered in the background, but I think the kid didn’t even realize she was there. He was frowning intently, trying to figure out the world when he had no eyes to see it by. He had been so dependent on his vision and never even thought that he might lose it. It was obvious he was grief-stricken, and yet, he was moving on, one minute, careful, clumsy step at a time.

You were my eyes, and now I must learn to walk in the dark. 

The Price of Forever

It was one of those odd instances in life where the greatest effect is done by the bystanders. We clustered together, most of the second grade class around Ava and Bruce. Ava had one hand on her hip, her chin thrust forward, and her blond ringlets jangling about her ears. Her blue eyes were narrowed and her pink lips poised into a superior smile. In her hand pressing into Bruce’s chest was a morsel of salt water taffy.


Neither I nor any of my classmate knew the name. Myra had smuggled the item into school that day, only knowing that her cousins in the city ate them a lot during her aunt’s funeral and her parents said she wasn’t allowed to eat one. While such admonitions were common, what was not common was the open bowl sitting within reach. Myra had stolen the candy during the service for her aunt and skipped with her parents back to safety in the Oak Glen. Now, she had presented the illicit article to us.


Ava had taken it immediately, more brazen than any of the rest of us. Her parents were rich and she was beautiful, which meant she had every reason to act boldly as she often escaped consequences. We children of parents of lesser mean, those whose mothers and fathers eked out every last penny to move from the city and protect us from the evil therein, were much more shy, as if we knew how precariously our position was in this world, that our parents would not live forever, but they wished that we might.

Bruce was one of us, but uglier and slower than most. He wore glasses and mumbled when he spoke. His twin brother, who was brighter and cuter, only highlighted his oddness. And now, here he was, cornered at the edge of the playground as we bystanders formed a barricade of bodies to keep him in and Ava stuck the candy under his nose. 

“Eat it!” Ava demanded.

“My mom said you’re not supposed to eat it,” Myra begged, but no one paid much attention to her. Bruce looked more closely at his shoes, biting his lip. 

“Eat it, Bruce,” Ava said. 

“I’m going to tell Miss Merriam,” Quentin shrieked, running away. He was always a tattletale and a compulsive liar. It would probably take several minutes for Miss Merriam to believe his story, so we ignored him too. All the same, we bystanders seemed to realize that our congregation would attract attention.

“Eat it, Bruce,” Ava said. She shook back his curls. “I’m telling you to eat it.”

Bruce grabbed the candy out of her hands. We gasped, entranced by the closeness of mortality. We had not yet been long on the Earth, but we knew the cost of food. We knew that to eat extraneous food was to sacrifice everything.

Bruce looked up at our sudden and guttural reaction. He seemed to find my eyes, and ask “Is this what I have to do? Is this what you want?” I think he only saw hunger in my open expression. The forbidden fruit was so close and someone might partake. 

Whispers rose and fell from us bystanders, unable to elucidate a clear desire. All we wanted to see was what came next, too afraid to step forward. I felt I could not stop nor hurry this process. I was only an observer. 

“Bruce, don’t do it! Dad says not to!” Bruce’s brother, Timothy, said, breaking past the line of us. 

Bruce shoved Timothy away. Bruce may have been ugly and slow, but he was big. Timothy tripped back into me, his mouth agape, as if that brief physical motion was the most surprising thing he could have ever imagined happening. 

“Eat it,” Ava ordered. 

Miss Merriam was squawking in the background. Our time was short. We bystanders leaned forward, unable and unwilling to hide our expectation. 

Bruce ate the salt water taffy. 

Miss Merriam diffused the crowd swiftly as we all set to running in opposite directions to avoid punishment. 

“Bruce was silly and ate a candy,”Ava declared, as if she had not been ordering him to. Miss Merriam, panicked, picking the child up and beginning to run to the school nurse. Timothy collapsed on the asphalt and began crying. 

Seeing the attention was away from us and focused on Bruce, who had no external effects for his sudden mortality, we stopped and watched. The question was all on our minds, “Why did he eat it?” A moment of peer acceptance versus eternity? But, it was never a choice. When we gather and egg another to his death, what else could he do? We were hive creatures sharing a communal mind. The desires of the many could overcome the desire of an individual, and our mere enjoyment at playing in the power of life and death had overridden Bruce’s desire for life. 

And Timothy cried and cried.



The principal sent a note to all of our parents, and, in turn, all of our parents sat us down for the talk. Mine decided that I should the history of immortality, a story of two scientists working fruitlessly for their parents, then their own lives. When their breakthrough came, it heralded a new era, but not for them. A complex mixture of drugs was not enough. It had to be combined with a specific diet and environment, a proper mix of oxygen and a tasteless broth of green-gray sludge. The couple’s own newborn daughter was their test experiment, and she was still alive, 273 years later. 

My father was raised on the diet. However, my mother was not. She was doomed to die, so he ate their wedding cake without remorse or hesitation. They would leave me. However, I had no such impending mortality, but I could never eat the candy. I couldn’t go outside to play without my respirator and special clothes. If I followed all the rules, then I would never have to die. If I loved them, I would follow the rules for them, because they had worked very hard to provide this opportunity for me. 

I loved them. I wondered if Bruce loved his parents.



Ava told us that Bruce would go away now since he was going to die. He didn’t. Instead, a week later, Bruce and Timothy came back to school. The principal told us we were to treat Bruce in the same way we treated him before, but I don’t think she knew how we treated him before. No adult would ever admonish us to continue that behavior.


We barely talked to Bruce. Ava took pains to loudly tell the other students that they should be extra nice to Bruce since he was going to die when he was in hearing distance, but otherwise, he drifted to the margins. Timothy would talk with his brother sometimes, but not often. For the most part, it was as if Timothy never had a brother. 



“My parents decided to stay in Oak Glen for me after the candy incident. They wanted to keep things normal as possible after everything. I mean, him and me both knew what was going to happen, but they wanted to pretend like it didn’t,” Timothy told me at the high school prom. His cute upturned nose as a child did not fit a growing man’s face. It made it look pinched, and his voice had barely dropped since then. He was thin as a reed, but still I had asked him to be my date. He was intelligent and he held the key to the story that interested me throughout my schooling experience.

“Where does he go now?” I asked.


“Oh, Bruce?”


I nodded.


“Well, eating gray-green mush and wearing masks loses their appeal when it isn’t helping you survive, doesn’t it? He moved out after he convinced my grandpa to let him go live with him in the city,” Timothy said.


“Sophomore year?” I asked.


“Yeah, I think so,” he said.


“Your grandpa, is he going to die soon?” I asked.


“He’s in good shape so far, but he probably only has a decade or two,” Timothy said with a shrug.


“My maternal grandparents are dead, but my dad’s parents are alive, and their parents too,” I said. “But my mom and dad are going to die sometime. My dad ate the wedding cake.”


“Mine are going to die too,” Timothy said. “All my family is.”


“I’m sorry,” I said.


“Me too,” he said. “It makes me wonder if it be better just to die, you know?”


I looked horrified, which caused Timothy to smile in a way that made his face look not so pinched. “Look at us, we’re dancing at prom and we’re discussing mortality. Shouldn’t we be partying or kissing?” His face flushed pink as he wondered how I would take the comment.


“How about the latter?” I said, reddening to match his shade.


“Okay,” he said. We kissed.



“Bruce Wallace died today,” I told Walt as I checked my email during break.


“Who? Is he an old boyfriend?” he asked, leaning back from his computer terminal.


“No, I knew him from elementary school,” I said. 

“I thought you went to one of those fancy, enclosed, immortality schools,” he said. His parents had put him through public school with masks and thermoses of gray sludge. He always held it against me that my upbringing had been without kids threatening to take off my mask and make me live a normal lifespan.

“I did, but one of the children ate a candy one day at recess,” I said.

He whistled, “Tough break. Imagine going through all of that just to have your five year old eat a piece of candy.”

“He had a brother who saw the whole thing too. He tried to stop him. I saw it,” I said. “I actually ended up dating the brother. That’s who invited me.”

“That sucks. Are you going?” Walt asked. “I mean, have you seen this guy since elementary school?”

“I think I will,” I said, opting for brevity over trying to explain my part in this death seventy years in the making.

“Do you need someone to go with you then?” Walt offered.

“Thanks, but you don’t have to. Funerals are the worst, a monument to our fragility and impermanence. This one especially, when he was born with such high hopes of living forever. Nana Nguyen usually comes with me. She was one of the first generations, you know. She knows how this works,” I said. I remembered when she held my hand at my father’s funeral. My mother had already past at that point, but Nana Nguyen comforted me, swallowing her own grief at the loss of her grandson.

“Alright. Do you mind checking out this coding bug. I’ve been staring at it for the last hour, and I swear I’ve made no progress on it whatsoever,” Walt said.



The city was cold and murky. My office building and home were environmentally isolated. I worse my respirator so little, I was afraid it would not fit, but it did. It seemed strange that my only clothes for braving the harsh elements of outside life were mourning clothes, but I realized the only times I ventured out from my protected shell was to attend a funeral.

Nana Nguyen met me at her home. Her genetics seemed to scramble in its passage to me, as there was little resemblance between us. I was much more phenotypically similar to my mother’s side of the family, which I was hardly able to meet as they all died so young. My Nana Nguyen and I looked more like best friends than relatives as we came into the funeral as a pair.

There were few people wearing masks, but only one I recognized.

“Hello Ava,” I said. “I haven’t seen you in a lifetime. I hear you are getting married?”

“Yes, Irma and I are tying the knot in, oh, is it only three years now? My, how time flies. Thinking about it always makes me so twitterpated. It’s like falling in love all over again. I heard about your loss. So terrible to lose one’s parents so young. I am sure it is difficult. Who is this?” Ava asked, switching from ecstatic to lugubrious to curious in smooth succession. “Someone special?” Ava winked with a mischievous sparkle in her eye. She had not lost her bravado.

“Oh, this is my great-grandma Hee Young Nguyen,” I said. “Nana, this is Ava Kennedy.”

“I’ve read your articles, Miss Kennedy. Quite fantastic. There are so many preconceptions about those who make our choice, that I feel those less educated than us make grave mistakes which are perpetuated in their children,” Nana said.

“I know the pain of loss, so it is my only hope that I might convince parents to make the responsible choice for their children,” Ava said seriously. “If just one parent chooses to raise their children within the confines of the Herriman Lifestyle and eliminate their risk of age-related disease and many other terminal illnesses, it would make it all worth the effort.”

The service started. I looked for Timothy, but could not find him. I wondered if it would have been too difficult for him to lay his brother to rest. I would understand. It had taken every part of me to lay my father to rest, and I had Nana Nguyen to lean upon. To bury one’s brother would be nigh impossible.

Several people spoke. An elderly, grieving widow recounted their life together. With mortality ever approaching, they had married so young, to try to carve out some happiness before it was snuffed out. A balding man spoke of his memories of his father and siblings. When people die so quickly, raising children could be done in quantity. The man had had two brothers and two sisters. A young woman, in the prime of her youth, whose only mark of accepting mortality was her missing respirator, spoke of the grandfather she knew who encouraged her into geriatrics at the local hospital.

A man approached the podium with white hair and a gnarled cane within an equally gnarled fist. I gasped after he spoke two words: “My brother.”

Beneath the wrinkles, beneath the age spots, beneath the baldness and sunken eyes, it was the boy I danced with at prom. It was Timothy.

Timothy, concerning himself with neither my astonishment or that of Ava’s, continued to speak. “My brother and I were inseparable as twins as ever were. We often claimed to be identical twins, although a half-blind monkey could see that we weren’t. Other times, we claimed that we used to be conjoined. We always had a good laugh at the quantity of people who would believe that lie.

“As many of you may know, my parents spent their life fortune trying to build a better life for my brother and I. On boths sides, there were early deaths of aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Our parents wished to save us from that. After they took us from my mother’s womb, we were given a processed blend of amino acids, essential fats, globs of carbohydrates, and a special mixture of supplements so that we may forgo aging. As most of you know, it was imperative that we only receive this nutrient mixture and breathe a special mix of gases in order to achieve our parents dream of eternal life.

“When my brother was eight years old, he ate a salt water taffy. It was watermelon-flavored. He had never tasted watermelon. He had never tasted simple sugar. They pulled my brother away from me. They tried to take it away. They made him throw up. They put him in the hospital. They attached him to more wires and tubes than a child can dream of, but my brother exited the hospital with the same diagnosis he had upon entering. There was nothing he could do. He was going to die.

“It was difficult for me. I represented what my brother could never have. All the other students at our school, who had been raised on the same nutrient broth, would never have to face their mortality. They treated Bruce as a pariah for his lifespan, as fully as they accepted me for sharing their fate. With Bruce so angry, a truculent rebellious youth, it was easy to slip away from him. Bruce and I became separate people. 

“It wasn’t until my last year of high school that I really thought on it. I was lucky enough to be invited to prom, and there, my date and I discussed mortality. It made me think. I never thought so hard in my life. It made me realize how much I was missing my brother. How much I was missing life. 

“I drove down to see my brother and my grandfather that night. Bruce was a funny guy. The first thing he asks when I show up after not seeing him in a couple of years in a rented tux, a borrowed respirator, and a rented limo already speeding off behind me was, ‘Do you want to join gramps and me for dinner?’”

“Bruce told me about his new school, all the new friends he made who didn’t care he was going to die in sixty years, all the foods he had tried, each one having a different flavor, the different sites he had seen outside the bubble we had lived in so long, and his new girlfriend who would later be his blushing bride. Gramps prepared a big pot of spaghetti. All of my food had come powdered in vacuum-sealed containers at this point, so I was mesmerized at the complex process of cooking. Then, I did something I thought I’d never do. I took off my mask and ate with them. The spaghetti was undercooked, the sauce was from an old jar that might have been expired, but it was the best thing I tasted in my life.

“I returned to school the next day, changing nothing. I ate the same muck. I was careful to use my respirator when leaving environmentally optimized structures and protect my skin from the pollutants and excessive UV light. I continued this charade until the day my parents died, then I began living for me. 

“Bruce taught me that life is made in imperfect moments. In grasping what you had now instead of yearning for a better tomorrow that might never occur. Without death, there was nothing anchoring me, nothing making me treasure my life, since the seconds meant nothing. There would always be another to replace it. Without Bruce, I would have never stepped outside my life to look at the world. I would have never traveled. I would have never enjoyed good food or have met my wife. Because of Bruce, my life was fundamentally changed in so many amazing ways. 

“Bruce was braver and more sage at all of eight years than I could have ever hoped to be. Bruce died, and I soon may follow in his footsteps, as I was always wont to do. But, because of Bruce, I have lived more fully than I would have in an eternity. Good bye, Bruce. You have been the best brother a man could hope for,” Timothy said.

“Thank you for coming. It has been a long time,” Timothy said, grasping my soft, unlined hand, enclosed in a special glove, with his bared aged one. 

“It has,” I agreed.

“Interesting speech, although it did rely on several logical fallacies whose propagation could prevent the longevity of an entire generation,” Ava said, while retaining her smile. She gave her curls a little jiggle, as if expecting Timothy to appreciate her beauty and thus accept her comment. 

“I thought it was excellent. I never really got to know Bruce, but I think I know now,” I said. Timothy’s warm eyes glistened. His nose still looked pinched, but it fit his lined face better than it ever had in high school.

“Thank you,” Timothy said. 

“You continue to perpetuate the myth that it is impossible to travel and stay within the confines of the Herriman lifestyle. New improvements in respirators and protective clothing has made traveling easier than ever. And, the nutrient supplements are now being introduced in three separate flavors,” Ava said. 

“Nana Nguyen needs to meet her bridge club at four, but I would really like to thank you for inviting me,” I told Timothy. 

“The pleasure was mine,” Timothy said. He grasped my hand again. As it left, an object dropped into my palm. Instinctively, I clutched it and slipped it into my pocket without a word.

I sat at my kitchen counter, staring at the object on the granite counter. I often found it ironic that I possess a kitchen at all, but it was one of the old houses that were reconfigured to meet the needs of the new booming market catering to those trying to reach immortality. 

I hit the edge of the wrapper, and watch the salt water taffy twirl. It was pink with a green border. It had little dark spots in the pink. I recognized the image from old picture books of my mom and dad. It was a watermelon. 

I had never tasted a watermelon. I would never, unless the newest sludge decided to adopt such a flavor. Even then, I suppose it wouldn’t be the same. 

My maternal grandmother was full of old adages. One such was, “everything in moderation.” It was deliciously ironic, which made my grandmother all the more likely to repeat it. 

Moderation was impossible here. Any mistake cost everything. There only existed a dichotomy. Inside or outside. Light or dark. Life or death. 

I had lived eighty years. I had never gotten married. I had never had a child, although even assuming I was married and wanting a child, many couples had to wait for decades in order for approval for conception. I could still have both those things. I could have anything, but instead, I had so little. So many things in life had been good, but I left them in hopes of finding something better. I could not blame it on such an exterior factor as a diet. The fault rested with me, but was this apparent immortality preventing me from living? 

I could be hit by a car and killed like any other. And what would I have for it? No widow or widower would speak at my funeral, no child, much less grandchild, no brother. Many people died before eighty, but I hadn’t lived, because I was waiting for a better time to do so. 

I unwrapped the candy. It was harder than puddy. My brain had difficulty accepting the item as food. The food had I had eaten previously the last eighty years did not resemble it in the slightest. If anyone Ava or Walt or Nana Nguyen could see me now, they would think I was crazy. My parents would say I didn’t love them. I could be charged with reckless self-endangerment. 

I raised the candy to my mouth, letting it hover by my lips, untouched by time.  I could smell its intoxicating aroma, more intense than any food I had ever eaten, than I ever would eat. The surface of the taffy was as smooth as my skin, and its colors were seen pristinely in unaged eyes that had seen so very little. 

Frozen in such a position, I wondered, what is the price of forever?