ninety seven seconds

Gnawing always. Tiny little worms. Gnawing. Deeper and deeper. Burrowing. The pangs were like a stake through his heart. Guts spilling out into his stomach. The smell of something stale rose in his nostrils. His throat was choking up. His ears felt hot and red. He saw all around him, but it, as in his vision, was dulled. He couldn’t focus. His right eye twitched. A dull throbbing in his head. The taste of his own saliva, furiously trying to replicate itself. He could feel the furrows in his fingers, the furrows that in common parlance were referred to as fingerprints. He lay in bed gazing sightlessly up at the ceiling. He had been here for hours. Each time, it felt the same. The entire time, it felt the same. He was wishing for it to end. The end was not coming. He stared at the off white ceiling. The day had been long. It had started with those feelings. No, even further than that. Breakfast. His daily pizza. It was incredible, as always. Not one day he didn’t think the pizza he made himself was bad. Every single day, even when he’d put slices of potato on it. Every day, it had been pretty good. It had been his day off from work. He had started to draw. And that was pretty nice. He had had some strange feelings. Those things we call premonitions. Something was going to go wrong. Then, and his heart shook, his eyes welled up around the edges, his pencil had started loving. Ghost? He shook his head. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it had already been moving. Wind. He would find some way to explain it. Some natural cause. Nothing supernatural. Because he didn’t want to explain or have to think about the fact that he saw himself. He saw himself, not a reflection, something older. A weary version of himself. If only for a second. There were no mirrors. It wasn’t a reflection. It hadn’t been. It was probably just his imagination playing tricks on him. Just his mind messing around with him. Maybe his mind was trying to tell him something. Trying to tell him what would happen. Maybe it wanted to survive. He looked around him. It wasn’t screaming at him. So what did his mind want now? He laid his head back and stared at the ceiling. It was starting to char. The smoke was everywhere now. The pencil moving. His mind trying to tell him something. And he realized. But by then it had been too late. They were all gone. No one was in the house. The fire had covered the exits. So if he had needed to die, he’d go to his room and do it. He closed his eyes. He was weary. A whipping sound. They snapped open. There it was again. The premonition. No, it was a delusion now. It seemed to be in his vision for longer now. Well, there were some far worse things than seeing oneself before dying. He seemed concerned. The boy wondered why. He closed his eyes for the final time. Just one minute and fifty seven seconds before the firemen hosed down the house.