The Story of My Death

You shoot me in my stomach and tell me that I deserve this. I feel nothing for the first few seconds, only the blood wetting me and coloring my dress red. When you carry me out of your car, to place me against a tree, I make sure that I smudge the blood all over your Yves Saint Laurent suit. I’m going to cost you something. The stomach starts hurting, more than anything I’ve ever known. You kiss me one last time, and tell me that you indeed loved me. I loved you too, baby, though slightly differently. The fool that you are, you shed a tear before finally leaving me. You can still call the ambulance, I say. That gets you worked up. The blood gushes to your eyes. You tell me that you want to end this nuisance, the nuisance that’s me. The generosity welling in you, you ask me if I’d like to be shot at another time, to make it quicker. No, thank you, I respond. You take away my phone and leave my diamonds on me. You abandon me in the wood to bleed and die. 

Oh god, that’s it, I think. My blood floods the grass around me. I know that a chicken’s blood is good for wisteria vines from a story I’d read about a Japanese prisoner of war. But I’m no chicken and the grass around me is some prickly sort of wild overgrowth. Shit. Think something substantial, I tell myself, something worth thinking in the last minutes of your life. I realize I have no substantial thoughts. A pang of pain rises up my stomach and makes me grind my teeth. I get ready to brace my death. I shut my eyes in anticipation. A second later, I try to open them, and realize I’m still alive. There’s a hazy film settling on my memory, a kind of delirium is kicking in. I’m thinking of things without exactly wanting to think of them. I can see people I loved and who loved me back, people I loved who did not love me back, people who loved me and who I didn’t love back. The colors in my recollections are merging into one another, forming circles, triangles and shapes that have no names. Now I can see nothing. The colors have all mixed into each other and there’s a blackness weighing my head down. My eyes are beginning to droop and breathing is becoming hard work. I shut my eyes. Breathe slowly, very slowly, I tell myself. I have taken a breath and it’s still inside me and I have to breathe it out but the darkness is crawling down to reach my throat to choke the breath while it still is inside me. There is a streak of light and I can see a little girl with hair tied in a small ponytail running frantically to reach the finishing line, her parents  cheering somewhere in the crowd. She runs, leaps, falls on her stomach, and crosses the line before anybody else. There is a final pang. Thus, I die.