Death Story

He jogged to his next class, books falling from under his arm. He turned the corner and heard the funeral bell ring solemnly, signaling yet another miserable third period that he was late for. He reached the class and hesitated, hand trembling over the unturned knob. He would have to lie to the teacher as to why he dared disturb the other students' concentration with his tardiness, and then he would be banished by silent default to the desk that's always empty in the back. He was compelled to not go in there at all, to simply step out of the window his disheartened eyes were staring through and into the gray and bleak city they were staring at.

Not everything before him was harsh and muted, however. And yet, his eyes were reluctant to see the patch of green on a nearby rooftop. The intrinsic beauty of such a tiny glimpse of life situated in such an unnatural place as the city was a foreign thought, and for a moment he knew hope. But confused and startled by the intruding feeling, he shivered, trying to rid himself of such an alien sensation. There was always a comfort in the known, a reliable quality that this still fresh and tingling feeling did not yet possess for him, and so he was subconsciously eager to again dread something, anything, anything at all.

He looked back to the classroom door, which did its job, dredging up feelings that trembled his hand violently again. After a few minutes the teacher noticed his shadow through the opaque glass and walked over to the door, startling him out of his revery and unintentionally knocking him to the ground. She helped him pick up his books before pointing to the chair that had, predictably, yet to be filled. As he passed, the entire class shifted uneasily, staring and pretending they weren't; not one dared make eye contact, and still, all of them were ready to look away were the feral to look up.

Already in more emotional misery than he had predicted for today, he set his books on the desk and rolled into the chair. Sinking into the familiar seat, he wished everyone would forget the incident and ignore him once again. And they did, as the teacher stood at the podium and told the class to pass forward their homework and get ready to take notes.

Sitting back in his chair and meditating the ceiling, the late-comer retrieved his homework from his book and mechanically wrote his name on the paper. The psychological programming of years of school silently instructed him that the “appropriate” place to put his name is in the upper right-hand corner, followed by the date and class period. He sat there for a moment and contemplated whether he really had a name at all. And, assuming he did, who had the right to tell him his own name? Why wasn't he allowed to name himself? But he knew the futility of fighting and signed his temporary treaty with conventionality, scribbling his bar-code in the corner of his paper in reluctantly confident strokes of his pencil: Matt Thompson.

He smirked and laughed at himself for not doing the simple assignment. But no one would have appreciated him if he had done the work anyways. He passed his signed contract to indiscriminate disappointment forward and didn't give the assignment another thought, just sliding his notebook from the stack of books. He opened to the first clean page, clicked his pencil twice, wrote the date, dropped the pencil, folded his arms, and sat back waiting for the lesson to start.

He drifted off, not really paying attention. Letting his mind wander, he immediately thought about the rooftop garden he had seen earlier. He imagined the meandering gray pebble paths winding their leisurly way through the lush green trees, and he thought it absolutely amazing that such a magnificient garden could fit upon a rooftop. He marveled at the simple life that could survive in such an uninviting environment.

These still unfamiliar feelings were too much for Matt, and he mentally rebelled. Quickly his thoughts had retreated from the garden itself to the multitude of people who didn't even noticed the greenery there on the rooftop in its understated mockery and contradiction of their desire to conquest the very nature they used to describe their desires. As the class continued around him, his mind wandered aimlessly, and soon, he had fallen asleep, silently dreaming of a grotesque world hidden behind his lightly twitching eyes.

A formless man lies nailed to a cross as blood pours from every square inch of his skeletal and starved body. The man turns into an alien man-in-the moon rising above a desert oasis, and orange sands and blue waters contrast with a sheen in the alien moonlight. A mammoth thunder storm blows from the west, lightning and the claps of thunder marking the its steady advance.

Matt was startled awake by the drone of the bell. Ignoring the remenants of his already forgotten daydream, he copied the assignment from the board. He picked up his books and didn't even notice that he had written three whole pages of should have been notes in the hour since he fell asleep. Just out the door he turned to the right, towards the window he had seen the garden through earlier. But this time something was different.

What had been a beautiful rooftop only an hour before was a smoking and charred ruin, a testament to the world's irony. A garden of fertile flora and verdant fauna was now a repulsive and deadly black. But the complete transformation of life to death didn't destroy the garden's simplistic beauty; rather, it birthed a new perverse beauty into the scene, that would have been impossible to explain.

But Matt wasn't even looking out the window. The previous dream had taken ahold of him again, this time far more maliciously than the daydream had, and far less honestly.

The bleeding man on the cross writhes in agony; vines sprout from the ground beneath the cross and grow up his legs, drinking the flowing blood and digging deep into his skin to quinch their thirst, until finally the green leaves have covered him entirely. The white and opaque surroundings dissolve and fade into the desert beach, the foreign moon growing a sinister grin and surveying his blood reddened sand and oil sickened blue water. The lightning in the harmless clouds strikes the rainbow water, and its ensuing fire casts a strobing glow on the man's face.

The security cameras captured the scene perfectly, both in the hall and eighty stories below. But unnoticed by the omniscient cameras, two pieces of paper float down into crowd.

Anyone can write their life story, but only a few write their death story.

And you have just read Matt's.