TheBlackPhoenix

         During what was an early morning in winter Clement had awoken with a sudden start. He rolled off his cot and smashed into the wax wooden floor. Black granite shelfs lined the walls of his room, and on them were nightmarish clay figures that clattered and shook – along with everything else that hadn’t been nailed down.
         A blanket of wool clung to his side; he struggled in panic and fought it off, then rolled back over, grabbing his head as a massive migraine ripped through his brain. Clement’s room was a barrier; cleaned beyond sanitary. Not a single speck of dust lay as a land mine to invite the suggestion of sloppiness - he chronically washed and organized everything.
         And never could people believe he was lazy, not with the statues all hand crafted by him, simply physical evidence that he did something productive with his time. Those same figures, molded in dusty clay, stared at him with accusations, as only they knew their reason for existence.
         Clement looked up and wiped his thin spider-like bangs from his head. One side was dyed red and gradually faded to a more natural black as it carried over to the other side. A splotch had stained his hand, though he barely noticed it as he reached up to pull open the top drawer of his cabinet. Inside was a Glock .22 and bottle of prescription pills. He kept them together, for one was meant to succeed if the other should fail. And as he had not a single positive thought, nor single strand of hope to keep going. Things could never be any different then they were now - the boy had decided.
         He turned the gun in his hands over. The very weight of the thing seemed threatening. The gun was a collectors item of his granddad’s while he was still alive from the WW2 era. It had notches along the barrel to distinguish how many kills had been made with it. Clement shoved the gun’s barrel into his jeans and tightened his belt to make sure everything was snug. As he softly closed the bedroom door behind him, he thought to himself that it was about to get another one.
         “Whats the gun for?” Celia asked as Clement reached the stairway. She was his younger cousin, twelve years old. Her nature was inquisitive with a skepticism that always left Clement wondering where she ever could have gotten it from. She was up early this morning and already dressed in cold gear. Snow pants and an overcoat that doubled as a red cloak with a hood. Wrapped around her head it made her brown hair appear dark and her intelligent oval eyes shined from beneath it.
         “Just putting this away.” He said, then hastily added “Don’t follow me.” she shadowed him while he made his way down the steps.
         “Why not?” She asked with just a tone of too much innocence and he couldn’t be sure if she was planning to be a nuisance or just wanted him to think so. Momentarily faltering for a reason, he sighed and looked back at her. The expression on his face was intense and not one she had seen before.

         “Because if you do I’ll smack you hard - no joke.”
         Celia tried to push him playfully but he stood in his spot like stone and glared back. Her face contorted and she stepped quickly out of the room without another word.
         Outside the snow was falling in a light drift; Its usual heavy assault must have been currently taking a spell to recuperate as only light flakes were present. The fields on both sides of his backyard had melded into a single splotch of white, and the barren landscape went in all directions but one. Here a forest of dead birch trees clustered closely together.
         Barefoot and shirtless, Clement shivered only as long as it took him to reach the trees, then his trudge through the snow was nothing short of numbing. The landscape arched upward into round slippery hills that lumped like ice cream scoops on top of each other. He climbed until it was too slippery to continue. His eye level was at the treetops – it was good enough, he decided. Just so that nobody would hear the gunshot.
         “Nothing ever has to be real again” he said to himself, though he didn’t really understand what it meant. A final sigh then a bang, followed by an awful silence as a mist of red settled down on the glistening crystals of that hill. There was no pain, not for what used to be the young man, his body now layed face down in the snow.
         In the brush a few yards away watched the eyes of a little girl. For the longest time she stared without moving, her brain trying to process something that it couldn’t – or did not want to comprehend. Cilia had torn her hood off and was now wringing it into a ball, her hands white from the effort.
         From above floated the apparition of Clement, his translucent spirit shimmering in the air with a glow that couldn’t be percieved by human eyes. He twisted and spiraled in the sky, circling in an axis that was caused by an internal dizziness. There was no way to tell her to look away, or any of the countless other things he wanted to say. Because now the darkness was calling to him and he had to leave. And in this case the Reaper was a horde of flying maggots; they hit his body like it had never died - his spirit feeling the stiletto’s impact, jarring as bullets. Clement doubled over and collapsed to the earth - then sunk through it. Somewhere along the way he lost consciousness, and when he awoke again he was in an entirely different world