smaragdine

Maybe more.

Maybe eight or nine.

After a while, I stopped counting.

I was dying even as I watched myself. I was living long enough to witness my own death.

I won't go into the details of how, though one could say the deaths were almost poetic. The strange thing is that it wasn't always me. The bodies were different,different faces, different lives, but I felt every wound as if it were my own.

By the third death, fear had begun to evaporate from me, slipping away through the cracks of the dream. By the fifth, I had developed a sick, troubled anticipation for the next one. I found myself counting the seconds it took for life to leave the previous body completely, waiting for my current one to inherit the pain, to feel it surge upward from the roots of the body and bloom inside the brain.

And by the seventh death, or what I believe was the seventh, it was finally my turn.

My body.

The one that had witnessed everything. The one I recognized not only as something to be killed, but as something that had lived.

I haven't said much about the killer, because perhaps then the story would become something else. What surprised me most was his complete absence of hesitation. I waited carefully for some flicker of doubt, some brief three-second consideration for the life he was about to take.

But it never came.

Not once.

My final death was slower. Maybe so I would have time to absorb the dream. To remember it.

I'm not sure I knew I was dreaming. But I knew I was about to wake up from dying somewhere else.

I remained on an orange, dirt-stained rug, motionless. My hands were full of electricity. I think I mumbled something, though I can't remember what.

I stayed there, breathing death in, until it finally occupied every corner of my body.