I walk until I hear the crashing of waves, smell salt on the wind. My feet veer off on their own, stop halfway, then tug me forward again. Like a dog, I’m yanked to the edge of the docks, then across them. The wizened wood creaks beneath my steps. Wheezes. To either side of me, large and small sailboats dot the docks, hang from them like leaves on a tree.
I walk until the ships part, and all that’s left is the sea.
Head cocked, it’s only then—looking out at the rippling night, its reflection below, the beast before me, all alone—that I feel something in me… snap. That I feel, at all. I stumble forward, pushed by some intangible thing that I didn’t even know I was carrying. It burns. It tastes like raw meat, and my heart—fluttering like a dying moth—itches my chest, and…
And I can’t breathe.
Not that I need to anymore.
But I still feel the panic, the sensation of suffocation. Odd, to feel so smothered in a place so big, so infinite. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the thing.
Mankind was never meant for eternity. They might fret over what comes after this life, but they also cannot handle this endless nothing. I cannot. Even as our hearts doggedly pump on, immortality doesn't negate pain.
When Death disappeared, we were left frozen as we were. My brother’s hair might grow, but he and the other sickly still suffer. The injured still moan. The addicts still want. The kidnapped, the tortured, the young, the brash. All of us are unable to rest.
My father thinks us damned and praises the day my mother was murdered.
My brother sees nothing but shadows. He was driven mad years ago by the stage three cancer that claimed him mere