You rise from your body, absently acknowledging you must have pushed your blanket off yourself in your sleep, considering you didn’t feel it sliding off your body. That, and it was cold. Not glacial, not algid, just cold. You stretch upwards, trying to cleanse yourself of the sleep-induced sluggishness but sighing when you hardly feel the stretch-
Wait.
Where did you just rise from?
…
It’s nauseating in the way you turn, the seconds or hours or millenia in which the pieces come together, joined like neurons, or maybe by spiderwebs. You…you are dead, the blackened substance clinging to your still, still, still body is blood, and you are dead.
No, no, this can’t be it. Death, your destiny- everyone’s really, what humans live for- must have more of a climax, must be… must be something. This is all wrong, this lack of catharsis is an undeniably pathetic finale to whatever life it is you suppose is gone now.
You rake despairingly at your body, or whatever you are, you are nothing, nothing at all. There is the jarring realisation that the window you reached for is not there, and your fingers have been bared to the parasitical, biting outside air. No, this isn’t fair. How is it you have no body, yet your mind still terrorises you with proprioception? There is just yourself and your corpse, who may as well be more of yourself than whatever you are now.
Your body may have lost its life, but you are empty, empty, empty as an abandoned chrysalis.
You remain like that, standing over your own corpse like you are the killer, but no, you are a ghost, or some supernatural being. You don’t feel supernatural. You feel… yes, you just feel. Feelings, abstract nouns, intangible, yet still there, still something, lingering. You are less than even that now, perhaps you always were, if this is the death you deserve.
The door opens, light from the corridor stalking in with brash, intrusive curiosity, latching onto the tar that embraces your body, colouring it red. There is a choked gasp, there is a screaming person rushing to your body, there is your sister, and you, and one of them is dead, and it is not her.
You wonder if when she woke up, there was something wrong in the air. If the house felt colder, emptier, if her stomach prickled with seemingly unjustified anxiety, if she checked your room first. How cruel that everyone would get your climactic death except you, the only one who fantasised it, dreaded it, anticipated it.
The door slams shut again, your sister on her knees now, agonised sobs caroming harshly against the walls. The light is gone. The blood has turned back to ink. Yours. Is your blood red or black? Maybe the light just makes it red.
“Are-” You suppose it must be a groan, a quip, maybe, but your voice, audible in your mind alone is a traitorous whimper, “Are you for real?”