It was less like a physical pain and more like a weight or pressure across his heart, like wearing the chest plate from a vast suit of armor. Even so, he could not bear this sensation for a minute more. He raised the cold steel of his grandfather’s .45 Colt Government and rested the barrel against his brow. He squeezed the trigger like he was shaking the hand of an old friend.
There was no sudden blackness nor blinding light. Instead there was a sensation that was more like hitting the fast-forward button on a VCR for a couple of seconds.
He had dozed off squeezing the remote between his head and his hand. His son’s eight-year-old face stared at him from the cerulean blue background of a long-forgotten water slide. Just like the sun in the sky, that face was everything. It would still be everything in sixteen years when he would get that call.
He could barely remember what it was, it was so far in the future, but the pain. The pain was with him now. His tears, waiting for their cause, were wet. His boy was enjoying his freshman year of college on his stepdad’s dime. He was clearly better off.
Just like the job prospects were clearly better for him in Denver. He was a master coder and rose through the ranks with the same speed that he slid through the thin steel band guarding the switchback curve from the sky that knew no boundary above and only cold gray rocks below, now painted with the last traces of his inner light.
Some wake to light. Some wake to mourning. Some don’t wake at all.
Literature in Small Doses 