He runs as fast as his exhausted feet will take him, staggering back down the hall, stirring up clouds of
dust, heading toward the sunshine like –
(like a drowning man reaching for air –)
He can vaguely hear himself calling out in distress, still wordless, still unformed.
But he knows.
He knows, he knows, he knows.
He stumbles down the front steps, barely able to stay upright, and then not even barely. He falls to his
knees and can't find the strength to rise again, as if the sudden rush of knowledge is a weight on his
back.
He looks to the house in panic, thinking that something, someone must be coming after him, must be
in pursuit –
But there's nothing.
There's still no sound. Not of machines or people or animals or insects or anything at all. There's
nothing but a quiet so deep he can hear his heart beating in his chest.
My heart, he thinks. And the words come clearly, cutting through the fog in his mind.
His heart.
His dead heart. His drowned heart.
He begins to shake, as the terrible knowledge of what he saw, the terrible knowledge of what it
means, starts to overtake him.
This is the house where he used to live.
The house from all those years ago. The house in England. The house his mother swore she never
wanted to see again. The house they moved across an ocean and a continent to get away from.
But that's impossible. He hasn't seen this house, this country, in years. Not since primary school.
Not since –
Not since his brother got out of the hospital.
Not since the very worst thing that ever happened.
No, he thinks.
Oh, please, no.
He knows where he is now. He knows why it would be this place, knows why he would wake up
here, after –
After he died.
This is hell.
A hell built exactly for him.
A hell where he would be alone.
Forever.
He's died, and woken up in his own, personal hell.
He's died, and woken up in his own, personal hell.
He vomits.
He falls forward onto his hands, spitting up the contents of his stomach into the bushes on the side
of the path. His eyes water from the effort of it, but he can still see that all he's throwing up is a
weird, clear gel that tastes vaguely of sugar. It keeps coming until he exhausts himself, and since his
eyes are already watering, it seems only a very short step to weeping. He begins to cry, slumping
back down to the concrete face-first.
It feels, for a time, like drowning all over again, the yearning for breath, the struggle against
something larger than himself that only wants to take him down with it, and there's no fighting it,
nothing that can be done to stop it, as it swallows him up and he disappears. Lying on the path, he
gives himself over to it, in the same way that the waves kept demanding that he give himself to them –
(though he did fight the waves, up until the very end, he did)
And then the exhaustion that's threatened him since he first opened his eyes overtakes him, and he
falls into unconsciousness.
Falls away and away and away –