Blood and Fire

It’s funny what you think of, in your final moments.

As a brilliant man once said: “it’s only possible to break through the sky’s boundary into its core using the power of the sun.” Without that power, you wind up hurtling straight through into the ground again, rebounding.

I saw the core of the world and its sun, that day.

I was dying.

I saw God and I saw hell on the other side of the depths of the sea. I tasted blood on my lips and heard my heart giving out. Saw the faces of my family, who’d already gone: a broken man and a bloodied woman I couldn’t recognise lying on the ground, a little girl whose face I couldn’t see; a toddler who weighed nothing. Killed by a monster.

And god, when hell spat me back out again, when every breath I drew in burned, and the shadows took my hands to turn them into weapons too late— Made my teeth into bloody knives that could only take more lives and bring none back— I thought about rebounds, and I wished I’d broken past to join them, instead.

But I couldn't. I can’t.

Not yet.