On the Threshold of Life and Death

And I'm dead. In the center of my school's quad, I lay on the ground, bleeding while everyone around me panicked from the sudden noise of a gun going off.

It didn't hurt, save for the split second when the bullet pierced the roof of my mouth. Strangely, even though I'm still fully conscious, I can't feel the pain of the shot. I can feel the cold gunmetal in my hands, I can feel the side of my body touching the rough concrete ground, I can even hear the sobs of the other students. But I can't feel the pain of the shot.

I heard it's because of a survival mechanism, where if we get hurt suddenly, chemicals rush into our brain and we won't feel pain for awhile so we can get away from whatever's attacking us. I guess that makes sense.

Interesting thing, suicide. Movies always show it as instantaneous. One second, you're alive. The next, bam. Eternal darkness. Or an afterlife, reincarnation, whatever. But the truth is, nobody really knows how long it takes for your consciousness to die. So I'm just as surprised as you that I can still see what's happening around me. I can still hear what people are saying. I can still feel the blood dripping from my mouth. I can taste it too. I hate it.

The bullet tore through my brain. My heart stopped beating a long, long time ago. But my consciousness still lingers. On the threshold of life and death, my consciousness still lingers.

The Purge

12 hours. That's all we have to endure. Once a year, every year, we have to make it through one night. Twelve hours. That's all.

Because once a year, every year, all crime is legal in America. All crime, including murder. Especially murder. There will be no government intervention, no police, no ambulances, and no firefighters available during the entire night.

Why does this night exist? The government claims that it "purifies" Americans, lets them "vent" their negative emotions.

But that's true only for those who can afford weapons, those who can afford protection, and those who are important enough to be exempt from the killing. Everyone else that doesn't fit into those categories dies.

I can't afford weapons. I can't afford protection. I'm not important to society. And neither is my seven year old daughter.

To the Ends of the Earth

October 25, 2024
Time to Impact: One Year

We lay side by side, on a vast emerald field, looking up at the night sky. A gentle wind glided over our thick winter clothes and scarves, running its hand over the fabric to flatten it. Blades of grass swayed with the ebb and flow of the breeze like waves across a viridian beach, occasionally breaking against towering islands of bark and wood. Hand in hand, we floated through a deep green ocean, surrounded by an archipelago of trees that sprinkled their leaves down on us like amber colored confetti, as if celebrating us.

But this was no time for celebration. This was a time for mourning.

The Test

This was it. The AP World History test. Eight months of study (really three days of cramming) led up to this moment. Outside our school library on a chilly Thursday morning, I held a piece of paper in my hand listing major civilizations, technological improvements, and events by time period which I studied frantically, as if trying to condense all of human history into a tiny, easy-to-swallow pill of knowledge. An impossible task.

Cycles

Part 1: Asleep

The scolding tone of the alarm, like an irate parent,

Commanding me to rise out of sleep, 

Signaling the start of another day. 

Awake, asleep, awake, asleep, 

Fluttering over two mental states as my eyelids flutter open and shut, 

Until finally, I'm awake, 

Reluctantly pulled from my solemn slumber.

Awake, but unwilling to pull myself away

From the sweet embrace of my bedsheets.

Awake, but uneager to rise and silence

The electronic screams by my side.

Awake,

But still asleep.

Zombies: The Western Musical

The three stood before the porch of the two-story saloon, the last building they hadn't yet searched in the small desert town. The three stood silent, attentively listening for any sound of the undead from within the faded brown, plank-thick wooden walls of the small, seemingly abandoned structure. The decaying wooden pillars that held up the awning in front of the cracked, wooden double doors and the shattered windows and broken glass strewn about everywhere on the sandy desert floor were all battle scars of both the house's age and the zombie apocalypse all those years ago.

Two minutes crawled by, as the trio stood in the hot Californian sun, the desert wind blowing specks of dust and sand in their faces, all with their weapons at the ready. No undead moans heard, but still, the three took caution. The dead could very well just be dead quiet.

Dmitri motioned to Pascal to follow him inside. The third one remained outside as a lookout.

The two slowly approaching the rightmost door, taking care to silence his footsteps. With the butt of his pistol, Dmitri nudged the door open, inch by careful inch, trying to avoid as much noise as possible.

A deafening creak, the burglar alarm created by rusted metal hinges of the generations-old door. And the moaning from within the saloon followed.

"They're awake." Pascal grinned.

Cloudburn

The countdown started.

Ten. The massive egg-shaped shuttle stood beside the passenger tower like a chrome mountain holding a steel crutch, towering over the charred, dead landscape.

Eight. Dim, dark orange sunlight reflected off the hundreds, thousands of one-way windows that dotted the sides of the shuttle in a grid, like a steel and glass net wrapped around a silver egg. Behind each window sat one, maybe two people, sitting comfortably in mahogany chairs and silk beds.

Six. The tip of the conical shuttle rounded off into a hemisphere. Five boosters spread evenly in a pentagon pattern were attached to the circumference of the egg's flat base base, each as wide as a city block.

Four. Inhabitants a world away stared at the shuttle through the glass in their television screens. A man watched far in the distance atop a hill, through the glass in his gas mask. A pickaxe in his hands.

Two. Absolute silence.

One.

A Hundred Lifetimes

I was never popular in school. I don't know why, maybe because I looked different from everyone else, being the only Asian in a white-majority school. Maybe because I was awkward and hard to talk to, or maybe because I kept moving houses and never had time to connect with people. Whatever the reason for my unpopularity, the result was as expected. I had few close friends.

As a child with all the free time of youth to burn away but without the friends to burn it with, I was bored for much of my childhood. That is, until I discovered video games.

Hour after hour, I would have competitions with friends made of pixels, driven by artificial intelligence. I would live the scripted lives of characters that existed not in my world, but in a world made of polygons and bits of code. In school, I was a loser, but here, I was a hero in a zombie apocalypse. I was an Italian plumber on a mission. I was the center of attention. And I loved every second of it.

But of course, every second I spent connected to the virtual world was another second I spent disconnected from the real one. As days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, my social life wilted away while my gaming life turned into an obsession, culminating to the point where I was actually playing my Game Boy during recess in school.

Which was how I met her.