The Day I Die

It’s three in the afternoon, and today is the day that I die.

A several day old pizza nuked in the microwave, a warm Pepsi, not much of a last meal, but I didn’t feel like I was on death row this muggy April afternoon. My clothes were a second skin as they clung to my body with all the sweat that poured off me. Part of me protested being outside, but several months after Christmas I figured it was time to take the lights down.

Bulbs of green, blue, orange, red, and yellow, though most of the blue and green burned out so it looked like Halloween decorations more than anything else. The lazy side of me, and it was very vocal today, said to leave them until October, no one will mind.

I grabbed the ladder out of the garage, a rickety thing. It lost a rung halfway up from where it had pulled loose and I had fallen after getting some paint above the rafters in the garage. My hand to the scar above my left eye, my face straight into the rung below, a sickening crunch, and a bloodstain to commemorate the event.

Garage floors tell interesting tales. Perhaps oil leaking from an old car, sawdust from that cabinet you were working on, or a bloodstain near the corner of the concrete slab next to a wall with two large screws for hanging a ladder.

I had it set up in the side yard where the roof slopped low next to several overfilled trashcans. They stunk, something was rotting, it smelled of death. Scrambling up the ladder and onto the roof climbing to its peak, an invading General armed with a large Philips screwdriver taking an enemy entrenched hill. The silvery gray shingles spotted with countless white circles from crows that plagued the neighborhood with their war cries.

I shuffled to the edge of the roof with my Philips in hand to pry the lights and cord from between the shingles. I lifted the first one up and pulled out a green cord along with several years of dirt and grime now liberated from its rooftop prison onto my hands. Forty feet and who knows how many shingles left to go.

I heard the branches in the tree in the front swish as I stood up, the violent rustling of upswept leaves on the lawn, the ladder falling over from a gust of wind. Then it hit me, a breath straight from the mouth of Zeus.

I felt wrapped up by the wind, some lost lover embracing me after coming in from the cold. It felt so light, only the sound of the clattering Philips as it hit the roof and bounced off into oblivion woke me from my reverie. What had been my concrete reality reduced to rubble. The world had only spun for a moment before I saw that I was no longer on my feet, half sprawled on my back sliding towards the void.

I remember going down the snow-covered hills behind my parent’s house on a little blue sled. I would fly off little ledges that I built up at the bottom of my imaginary Alps. I would yell and laugh as that excited kid. No sound escaped my lips as I slid off the roof.

The world was spinning, the crows were cawing my doom, my shade was rising up to meet me. A faceless crowd witness to my fall from the heights of mortality, I was to become one of them. The shadows grew longer, the world’s dark teeth bared ready to swallow its prey.

Zeus’ thunder echoed across a quite neighborhood as a body crumpled against well-groomed green grass.