-1We hold our breath until we need to gasp in the bitter cold cemetery air. We deny the world whenever we want to, and at the end of it we always wind up bending to it one more time, because we need to, to survive. Although survival's been the last thing we wanted since either of us can remember. Death's just so much more alluring in it's permanence, and we love to toy with it, as we're doing now. We die in so many beautiful ways together, only to rise again to flash fleeting dark smiles at an audience that's shocked to silence, then clamoring with outrage, for performing in their sight the inevitable and undeniable truth that they blind themselves t hide from. We choke, we asphyxiate, we fall, we bleed, we poison, we stab -- playing with the fears flickering over the depths of your mind.

But not today. Today, Ginger and I have decided to take a break from that particular morbid game to play another one. There's but one cemetery in Bailey Downs, and it's on a hill near the outskirts. It's more or less typical of a place that's always trying to ignore its own inherent dismalness and persevere towards a vague something else. So, of course we find ourselves here every now and then, breathing in and not breathing in the cloyingly sweet graveyard scent adrift in the autumn wind. Sad, really -- the only pretty part of Bailey Downs is the cemetery.

"Hey, B," says Ginger, nudging me in the side with her elbow, not removing her arms from their folded position across her chest, "think you can break my record?"

"Which is … ?" I ask, already bored with this.
"Forty-nine seconds. So … you think you're up for it?"

I empty my lungs, then fill them to the bursting point. The counting in my head beats in time with my sister's mouthed words as I look up to the half-bare branches scraping against the grey sky to distract myself from the horrible pain this game always causes me. I hold out as long as I can … which is always at least ten seconds short of whatever record Ginger's set. Maybe subconsciously I don't want to win against her, I think to myself. The air rushing in to fill my scalded lungs tells me otherwise, that my inferiority is purely physical. Ginger is simply more adept at suffering than I shall ever be.

"God, you're pathetic …" she spits at me. I wait until my entire body cavity has ceased to ache to reply.

"Well, you are older than me."

"Yeah. And that also means …" she surveys the town below us like the vulture she is, glaring down at a carcass, " … I'll be the first to fall." I hadn't wanted to hear that. My cringe must not have been merely internal, for she immediately followed up with, "Well, let's think about it, B! It's gonna happen someday."

"I won't let it," I half-whisper in my most venomous voice. If Ginger succumbs to that crawling, disgusting mess, I know I won't stand a chance while facing my own fall. "We're not like them, Ginge. That shit will never happen to us."

"How do you know it won't?" she demands in an exasperated tone.

"I just … know. Neither you nor myself will ever be reduced to that," I state, heavily enunciating the last word while pointing down at our hell.

"I suppose you're right. Just isn't our style," she says, one side of her mouth curled into a smile as she lights a cigarette.

But we both already know how it will end. As I gaze down at Bailey Downs, I feel as though I'm staring into the coldest void imaginable, the center of which I am and shall always be gravitating towards. For there is no such thing as free will in the face of this emptiness. As with Death, there is no other choice.