HOW WILL I DIE?
I often wonder what will one day kill me. I’m not being morbid, merely curious. When I was younger, I believed I was immortal. My father’s people came from the mountains and were known to live past a hundred. I feel no real tie to them, yet I’ve happily claimed two of their traits: longevity and blood revenge.
I’m still relatively young, but age is beginning to announce itself, especially in autumn and winter. My joints ache. Old health problems flare up with tiresome regularity. Immortality no longer seems guaranteed. If I can make it to fifty, I’ll count it a victory.
A friend once told me, in response to this very thought, that weeds never die and creaking carts last longest. I hope she’s right, though being likened to a weed or a rattling cart offers only the faintest comfort. In the meantime, I live each day as if it were my last, cramming work, study, writing, reading, and a dozen other things into twenty-four hours that were never meant to hold so much. Eight of them are lost to a soul-crushing job, another eight to sleep I rarely manage to claim. Thank God for insomnia.
Perhaps the elements will take me. In primary school I had a teacher called Mrs Bridgette who despised me almost as much as I despised her. She couldn’t touch me in the classroom; I was always top of the class, homework perfect, outshining everyone — including her own daughter. That, of course, only sharpened her resentment.
Physical Education was my undoing. Small, slow, and weak, I couldn’t keep up with the herd of little cows and bulls around me. Twice a week, Bridgette and her daughter enjoyed their petty revenge. Worst of all was swimming. I couldn’t swim, and the pools were filthy. Add mysophobia to the list of my afflictions; it’s not the most dramatic, but it’s certainly there.
Bridgette knew I couldn’t swim, yet she still ordered me to cross the deep adult pool. Halfway across, my strength failed. My limbs stopped obeying. I began to drown, alone. Bridgette’s fat backside was warming itself in the shallow children’s pool. The lifeguards, as usual, were nowhere to be seen. The chlorinated water and I fought a long, ugly battle. Fear swallowed my small body whole. I tried to scream, but the water kept choking me. I was certain I was dying.
Then a girl from my class swam towards me. I latched onto her arm like a drowning cat, nearly breaking her fingers. We reached the edge, and with the last of my strength I hauled myself onto the cold, wet tiles. I lay there shaking like a beached dolphin on the yellow floor that bred foot infections.
Eventually someone fetched Bridgette. She knew she was at fault, yet she still scolded me loudly, playing the concerned mother: how dare I attempt something no one had asked me to do? I was too cold, too shocked to answer. I simply let her words wash over me.
They say a man destined to drown cannot perish by fire. I believe it. But suppose the elements spare me. What then? An accident? Lightning? A plane crash? A fall from a cliff? All dramatic, all unlikely.
Or perhaps it will be a person. To my loved ones I am an angel; to everyone outside that small, fiercely guarded circle, I am a bitch from hell. I protect what is mine with teeth and claws. The circle of my enemies, meanwhile, grows with every job I lose and every man I discard.
Men rarely seem to appreciate me. I’m attractive, financially independent, intelligent, twice-degreed, a homeowner, child-free, and slim. Still, it’s never enough. They tire of my confidence, my dignity, my refusal to worship them. One day, I half-expect one of them to try and strangle me.
Yet none of the above has killed me. They’ve bruised and battered me, but I’m still here. The real danger came quietly, from an unexpected direction. It crept up slowly, then looked at me with feverish red eyes from behind a carnival mask.
