Something tiny

Everything passes by so swiftly, everything ends before you even realise it’s begun. That’s why I don’t get suicide. Suicide is impatience.
I know a few people, friends, who’ve died. Most sad, their deaths aside, was that they barely knew they were alive. I mean, they barely thought about it: this thing, existence.
So, is living a reckless pursuit? Should we think more about it, consider every option, enjoy every painful second? I’m not saying I have the answers, I’m just saying: think about it.
I know it’s scary - hell, it’s a massive thing, too big sometimes for a human mind to cope with, to massive to comprehend. Not just where we are, and why – mere specks in the shifting universe – but everything here and hereafter. Time, infinity, the breathlessness that awaits us all one day.
What next? Hmmm, have you thought about that?
Next time you feel something, think about it. Then maybe you won’t ever think like Vanessa, because every day I miss her. And every day she’s missing something. It maybe tiny, something she never even thought was special; but maybe all I had to do was make her realise how special that thing was. Maybe that would have been enough?
My friend Patrick was a valet at some swanky hotel. He was driving a great new car, an Aston Martin. And then he crashed it. He wasn’t even going that fast, they reckon, but he died all the same. He felt like James Bond driving that thing, so he rang up to tell me. He sounded so charged, so vital. It’s sick, really. The owner of the car was distraught; the Aston Martin was written off.
My Aunt Susan was a painter. Now she loved life, or at least she loved the opportunity life had given her. Not just to notice the tiny things around her – the flower growing through the concrete, the butterfly landing on a brown autumn leaf, the moon shining through the mist – but to love it, to suck it all in and feed off it, and to capture it and share the bounty with others.
Aunt Susan found she had a brain tumour. First it affected her hands, so she couldn’t hold a brush. Later she couldn’t see. And that’s cruel. It’s cruel to take away something so loved and so needed, you know?
Anyway, just remember that. For me. Okay?

Entropy

He looked to heaven, as if the watching hordes of angels could halt this pain, could prevent his very dermis being sucked into hell.
His tongue had long gone, but the surprise had not been the suck and pop of its demise but rather the continued sucking and tearing of whatever was attached to it.
As the lining of his mouth shifted convincingly towards the back of his throat, so his lips and the skin of his face followed. Each flowed over where the other had been. A slow tide of sludge, as muscle seemed to absorb into this mess-like paste and join the flow. As if agonising, blistering rivers of molten ash, his body choked. A volcano in reverse.
His vision condensed as liquid flesh poured its mould over his sockets and dragged balls and eyes to their eventual demise.
He seemed aware of less and less pain. His body was mostly touching the ground now. Bone and muscle was breaking down and his form had become simple jelly.
Before his nerves and brain joined the chum, he was aware of an amazing feeling, as every part of his body seemed as one cell, one sensation. He may have known everything about sensation and, in a moment, known nothing again.
Teeth joined hungry Charybdis. The sucking demon seemed hungry for the world but soon there was nothing external.
Merely a thick tube led to a grotesque sack. Bulges travelled in the pipe - a python crushing its prey and forcing it ever onwards. Mucus there was, but mucus too joined the vaccuum; the pipe itself drawing eternally internally.
Everything became the sack and the sack, everything. It would have swallowed the sun and drank all the seven seas had the child not merely chosen to swallow himself.