BLACK FLAMES

ACCEPTANCE

ACCEPTANCE

No one had been warned. There were no signs clearly visible pointing to the inevitable catastrophe that was about to engulf the world in its death grip. It had happened before and will happen again, no doubt about that. But no one knew, no one had warned the innocent people that roamed the streets, going about their normal lives. The lives that was about to be cut shorter than they might or mightn’t have imagined. God had his ways of inflicting the end of this overdue planet, but none of them was as obvious as this. But no one saw. They all looked, but none of the seven billion people that lived on this great ball of blue fire could see past the facade that was put so unprofessionally in front of their eyes. No one was aware of the preordained phenomenon that was about to happen, whether they liked it or not. Out of all the life form that existed on this planet, only one soul knew. Only one person in the spherical anthill was aware of when why and how time would be perished. Only he knew what pain the humans would be put through. Only Jimmy Felon knew, and he wished he didn’t know. He wished he could end his life, but out of the many times he had tried the effort had been wasted in its entirety as he miraculously bounced off the pavement, or as the knife suddenly became blunt as he picked it up, and tried to cut through the vein that was suddenly as hard as rubber. Or the train that suddenly stopped in front of him, as if put under the pressure of an imaginary wall; or the noose that magically snapped apart as swift as his neck should have. Or the explosion that he seemed to emerge from unscathed, leaving him only more hopeless as ever. But as the time went by, he started to look on the bright side of things, the dim side that barely shined as bright as the flame atop the wick of a candle.

He started to understand his purpose in life, and that boosted his hope up as much as a snail could travel in under a minute, but it boosted his hopes nonetheless. It tortured him in many ways humanely possible, but it still gave him the slightest flicker of hope, the light at the end of a dark and eternal tunnel in his mind. But he had learned to live off dim hopes as long as he had lived, and that slight swelling in the chest gave him as much excitement and apprehension as the concept of going to heaven to a normal individual would be. But out of the sixteen long and torturous years he had been living on this planet he had never felt so alone and ashamed of his self. Never had he felt so much matrimony inside his chest.

Never had he felt anything in his chest, and that said a lot of things. Life had played with his emotions as easily as a cat would play with a ball of wool. Now he could see the hidden threads that made up the ball of wool, and he understood the responsibilities that it had put on his shoulders. He knew that he was the only person on this planet that could stop it, and that filled him with a goal, the first goal that he had ever made, and thus a goal that set his nerves tingling and his soul aflame with anxiety and sobriety.

A goal that put the fate of the human civilisation on his shoulders.

Jimmy sat on his bed, twiddling his thumbs. His face was all calm and smooth, but inside he was a wreck. Anxiety mixed with fear and depression sat at the bottom of his stomach, threatening to rip out his heart. His mother came in and called him down to dinner, but it wasn’t until she was shouting his name that he realized she was talking to him. He turned his head ever so slowly, and threw up.  His world blurred and it felt like he was spewing acid. His mother jumped back hurriedly as her son spat out the contents of his stomach. “Zach!” she shouted. “Honey! Get up here, your son – “

His father was already there before she could finish her sentence, and concern replaced annoyance on his face as he saw Jimmy, still throwing up.  “Jimmy, what happened, are you OK?”

He honestly tried to speak, to tell his father that he was soon going to die, that the world was going to die. That the angel of death was going to unleash his rage on this excuse for a broken planet. But the vomit came out of his mouth, preventing any words to escape.