When you’re dying- you don’t think about the way shadows whorl around you in every thickening drifts. It slips in at the corner of your eyes- blackening like burning news reels during a theater fire. You can feel the harsh thump-ka-thump of your heart as the muscle tries to work the thickening blood through your veins, but you know- as all dying animals do.
That your minutes are counted, and your breaths are slowing.
The scrabbling of your fingers for purchase, as you try to find one more moment, one more handhold on sanity as you hold onto the blood that’s escaping the vessel of your body. The realization that the harder you hold on, the less of it you keep.
And yet, like a vision- one of horror, or perhaps- one of a fantasy, it’s hard to tell with you anymore. Your dying wish was to see him anyway, wasn’t it? You watch him, striding out of the night’s hold with the ease of those monsters you used to evade before bed.
Launching yourself so they couldn’t grab your ankles from underneath beds, and out of closets.
But here, they land you with shotguns- and silver tipp’d claws.
You smile to yourself, despite the cold that’s creeping up your arm in icy vines. It’s not right, that feeling- and you know it’s the start of complete system shut down. Your lips pull up as bone and black tilts at you- birdlike and confused.
Or perhaps- they’re smiling too.
Still, it’s fitting and right- you think, as your thoughts bump and tumble against each other. Growing sluggish in their spots as things begin to slow further, and further in the miasma of exhaustion that’s creeping over you. Your own personal Grim Reaper coming to collect the shattered thing you call a soul for one last chase under the night’s sky.
Funny- this was not how you thought your story would end, but then again- were you ever really the author of your own book?
Or were you just the footnote all along.
