THE ENDING AGAIN VI
by UC Poika

It was so hot in my apartment. I just had to get out of there. It was hell. I had to get somewhere, where there was air-conditioning. I would have brought Sammy, but they don’t allow cats at the mall, even cats in a pet taxi. So poor Sammy is home in that hot apartment all by herself. I know. I just know it makes me evil. But I don’t care. I wasn’t going to just sit there and bake. Say you don’t suppose Sammy will actually bake her brain do you? I mean it’s just as hot and stuffy in there as a parked car. I mean, it could be by now for all I know. I mean if anything happens to me what happens to poor Sammy? It is so hot in my apartment.

There sure are a lot of kids here at the mall. I suppose it’s like that every time it gets hot out. It shouldn’t bother them though. Most of them have air-conditioners at home. They probably don’t think of that though. All they can think about is themselves. They can think no further than wondering what they are missing out on and where their friends, as they call them, are doing it. The boys are all worried about what girl they might miss seeing, even though most of them would never dare say a word to them. And the girls wonder if they just might miss that first time that special looking boy smiles at them, or God forbid, even speaks to them. I see it all the time so I know.

Well I was just sitting there watching all the goings on when I heard a car backfire, not once but several times. The kids started yelling and screaming. It was terrible. Then the ones in front of me began lying right down on the floor, though I never think of it as a floor. It is much more like ground than a floor, or at least a sidewalk. Did you ever think about that before? Anyway I said to myself, “Silly kids! What are they up to now?” when all of a sudden I felt this awful pain in my shoulder.

I looked and half of my shoulder was gone and all there was there was busted bone and raw meat with a lot of blood all over. When I reached for it with my good arm which is my right arm. That’s always been my good arm all my life, but I don’t mean it like that I mean the one that wasn’t hurt. It was then anyway that I felt this terrible pain which was worse than the pain in my shoulder I think. It is strange how the same injury can hurt so much more in one place than it does in another. Don’t you think it is kind of weird it is like that? Well I do anyway. Instead of grabbing my arm I grabbed my neck and it’s all blood so that when I look down at my blouse it’s all blood, and it’s even on my best dress which is ruined. Isn’t it funny that here I am mortally injured as far as I know and all I can really think about is that it will probably ruin my best dress if I get blood on it. Right then, you know, I feel something warm hit me right in the chest area, and I think I’m hit again, just when someone screams and I look and a good chunk of a kid’s head who was standing near is missing.

Finally I realize it’s not only me that is getting shot, not that I really realized it at the time exactly. I mean, it’s weird when something like that happens you really don’t realize what’s going on. I mean you know you are hurt and then you know you are shot, and then finally after it’s pretty near over with you realize what it means. But anyway I realized that someone had just opened fire on the whole group of us, and all I could think about was that he must really be a good shot. He was hitting a person with nearly every shot. I wouldn’t be surprised he was some sort of marksman. I could never shoot like that. My dad took me shooting once but I almost never hit anything to be proud of. In fact several times I didn’t even hit the target.

“You okay?” I asked the kid with half his head gone.

Now is that stupid or what? However he looked right at me with a look of surprise on his face as he fell. I thought it was funny that he stood that long with an injury like that. Wouldn’t you think he would have died instantly? You know like never knowing what hit him sort of thing—no pain, no fear, no nothing, just all of a sudden dead. Then someone screamed in my ear and I went to turn my head to look at see what was happening when I suddenly got dizzy and fell forward off my seat right on the floor that’s more like the ground than a floor by far. You know, the same floor I was talking about earlier except that it was me hitting the floor rather than kids.

Man did my arm hurt! Then when I tried to move it, I couldn’t. I remember thinking that he probably shot my arm right off of me. But it was just broken from the fall just like my knee which hurt but not as much as my arm. Neither one of them hurt like my neck when it was hit. By that time it was all but over, however I remember I got all dizzy and my chest felt like there was a hundred kids lying on top of me putting their full weight on my old chest. I heard one time that, that’s the way it feels when you have a heart attack. Maybe I had one of them too? I don’t think anyone knows though. I know I don’t. I just got so dizzy I was about to get sick when all of a sudden like—well not all of a sudden either, it was more like one of those lamps that have a dial on them so the light can be turned up or down slowly. I always wished I would have had one of them. I think they are really cool—or the bee’s knees like my mother used to say. Don’t you think that is really a funny way to put it, ‘the bees’ knees’? Anyway that’s the way it happened it was just like someone turning one of those lights down all the way to off, but when the light was off I was aware for awhile of what was going on around me anyway.

“Yeah, she’s got a pulse,” they said and I knew they were talking about me. Isn’t it funny you know something like that? I mean I couldn’t see them. All I could do was hear them and yet somehow I knew they were talking about me. Then they said, “Get the defibrillator over here! She’s flat lining all of a sudden.” A moment later then and I could see again but just for a second and my whole body jolted like I had been struck by lightning or something. I was just about to get used to the dark again when—boom—they hit me again. I could feel it but I never saw any light. It was like a flash of electricity in the dark, like when something shorts out. Even thought there is no flash there is something that reminds you of a flash anyway, even when there isn’t one. Have you ever noticed, or am I the only one who ever felt like that? I never asked anybody about it before. I probably should have but I never did.

Then they gave up I guess because there were no more shocks. I just laid there unable to move like I was paralyzed except that I couldn’t move my head either. Then it got all quiet like. Actually it was already quiet. It’s just that I didn’t know it until I got used to not being able to move. I tried to take a deep breath but I couldn’t, and yet I didn’t feel like I was suffocating—still it was a weird thing to realize I couldn’t breath, not at all. Like I was saying though, it was very quiet, more quiet than I had ever heard before. However, you can’t really be hearing that kind of silence. It is not like the relative silence as you probably know it. It was, I’m pretty sure, absolute silence, and you can’t hear that. There is nothing to hear. And yet there I was trying to listen to it.
Finally it wasn’t even dark. It wasn’t light either. It was like something is when you are not paying attention to it. It isn’t necessarily in the dark even though you didn’t see it, and it isn’t in the light necessarily either. Then all of a sudden you see it again and you realize it must have been there all the time, even when you weren’t paying attention to it. Am I making any sense? But it isn’t even clear. When something is clear it looks like something you can see through, and it’s not like a ghost or something that’s invisible either. That would be, what you looked at but it wasn’t anything you could see. This type of nothing was like the room was when you were lost in thought, and that’s the way it stayed. Maybe that was all there was to it. I just wasn’t paying any attention to it. Yet if that’s true I am still not paying attention to it, not even when I’m not thinking about anything else besides it, then too I can’t see it even when I am thinking about it, like now. I know it’s there. However I know I am not there or I am not conscious of it one. Maybe I am crazy.

All I know is that I wasn’t thinking crazy thoughts like that then. I was remembering my whole life from beginning to end. I remembered everything that happened to me that I realized happened to me. Now that doesn’t seem like much but the surprise is that it was clear after awhile that part of what must have happened to me I never realized, and I entertained myself thinking about what might have happened that I missed. It was only speculation you realize. It was not something I could actually know, but it was something to think about, and one thing I knew I had plenty of time to do that.

Then I thought about all the things I had missed because of my many illnesses. I didn’t have any remorse and I wasn’t jealous of those that had those things, even those who took them for granted, I was just wishing I would have had them. You know, it would have been really nice to have had a date for the prom, not to mention a boyfriend, or a husband—even a lover. However, I got by without all that. I tried to imagine what it was like to have children—even one would have been nice. There were all kinds of things like that to think about. You know what though? I was not unhappy. Not in the slightest. I was relieved it was all over. I never thought in terms of life and death, they were ridiculous both of them, there really isn’t such a thing. I was just relieved that all of that I once called living was over with, now I could really live!

Life and death! My poor Sammy! He would probably starve to death. I had no friends to check on him. I had no family. They all died before I did of health problems similar to those I had. It was so hot in my apartment when I left. Surely Sammy was miserable. I didn’t mind Sammy dying. I just didn’t want her to be tormented with hunger and heat the rest of her days, no matter how many that would be—even a few minutes was too much agony for my dear cat. ‘I’ve got to get to Sammy somehow,’ I thought.

Then I felt my—self? Yes, I suppose that’s the word for it—I felt myself rise up out of my body which I realized was hard and cold after I came out of it. I must not have been paying attention while I was in there, and the idea of going back is really repulsive to me now. How could I have ever stayed there so long?

Once outside my body I tried to deal with my surroundings. Where in the world was I? It was cold. Not just cool. It was very cold almost like a refrigerator room, not quite but close. Was I...? Sure I was at the morgue. However, where was the morgue? I walked outside the building I was in and found it was not a place that was just labeled morgue but a funeral parlor of some sort.

It was late in the evening and I walked the entire distance to my apartment once I determined what part of the city I was in. About three blocks from my apartment house I saw a man with a dog. The dog saw me but I could tell the man did not. The dog wagged his tail and asked me to pet him using his body language. The man noticed what his dog did and said, “What’s wrong boy? I could have sworn you saw someone. There’s no one there boy. Is there boy?” and I remembered asking my cat if she saw something I didn’t before. I always tried to chalk it up to my imagination but never quite made it if you know what I mean. Never the less, I felt sure that Sammy would be glad to see me when I got home.

When I came to the apartment building I remembered the main door was locked for security. Instinctively I tried the door handle and was surprised when my hand went right through it. ‘How in the ‘H’ am I going to open the door?’ I thought not realizing I could just walk right through it. I stopped and thought about it awhile and then as if remembering I realized the truth of my physical being—or lack of that whatever is the case—and walked right through the door, down the hall and up the stairs to room 4355 without even getting winded.

Then I walked right through my apartment door. It was a weird feeling, perhaps stranger in a sense than dying. I had never done either one, but going into my apartment without having to unlock it was really a weird feeling. However, there was Sammy sleeping on the couch. My sweet little friend was just calmly sleeping.

“Sammy!” I whispered for reasons I have not yet figured out.

He raised his head and looked at me as if he saw nothing out of the ordinary, so I walked over to the window and tried to open it. Of course that was out of the question my hand went through material objects just like I was a ghost and perhaps I am. Then I went out the window and called Sammy. He went to the window wondering either what I wanted or what I was doing out there. Then I just kept calling his name,” Sammy! Sammy! Come here Sammy!” like that. Finally he became upset and began to meow over and over again, louder and louder.

“Shut up!” the neighbor yelled and hit the wall.

Sammy responded by realizing someone heard him and started meowing even more frantically.

“Damned cat! I’m calling the cops!” he said. Then I head him talking to the cops declaring there must be something wrong with me or my cat would never act like that. He never had acted like that before.

Finally the cops came and when they went to let themselves in after getting no response from me Sammy got out and went running down the hallway towards the open window at the end of the hall where someone had stolen a screen. Then out the window he went, out onto the outside ledge, then over to a nearby canopy and finally to a tree, down the tree and off toward the alley. ‘Sammy the alley cat!’ I thought glad he was free.

Then suddenly I was back in that place that is neither night, nor day, neither clear, nor invisible, neither here nor there, everywhere and nowhere just like I was a lot before I died. You know, that place you are at when you drift off watching the boob tube or like when you drift off at bedtime before you go to sleep. Maybe you don’t go there as much as I did and still do? I have always had a lot more of time than anything else.

Me? I kept watch over Sammy until he died. Then I found a writer who doesn’t know it but he can hear me. He wrote my whole story for me, just the way he heard it. However, pretty near all the time I drift off to that place living people ask, “Where were you?” when they realized you have drifted off and you realize you were somewhere else. Maybe that’s a good name for where I live now—somewhere else? But I prefer to think of it as back to the ending again




THE END