Center of Attention

What Death is Supposed to Feel Like

       He sat down in his chair most days, and he watched the cars go by like they had a significance to them that the rest of the world did not. Smallik stared into his aging eyes and watched the cars go by in his reflection. He only asked the old man one thing. "What do you think death feels like?"
       Vittatta stared for a moment longer until finally looking into Smallik. "It feels like a knife, a cold blade that's constantly against the base of your neck. It hurts, it chokes. And you're the only one that's holding it there aren't you, Smallik?" Smallik smiled. It was time to play by his own rules yet again, and he picked up the cold blade Vittatta described. He pushed it towards Vittatta's neck, and he watched the light go dim. The reflection of the cars... It was gone.

       I imagined my death quite often. It was something like a spark in the beginning, filled with every waking moment you shared before your final breaths. You would be reminded of how you would die no matter how unjustified the end, and you would be reunited with the other lost souls that had died before you. I had imagined what it felt like to hold my wife all over again. My voice would pick up and tell her that I wasn't good enough for Ogillitiy, that he was left behind to live a life without his parents. That wasn't true. I would just end up falling apart if I saw her face after fourteen years of her being gone. 
       However much I imagined it, it wasn't the way it turned out.
       My wife never came. I was left in the blackest of voids where I couldn't even hear my own voice. Some had called that space, which was where the stars in the sky had resided and there was no air to breathe. It was a vacuum. I tried to call out for anything to happen, but everything was just... not there. I felt a chilling sensation rise up my back. Something was wrong. I was living a lie.
       The black void suddenly became a white space filled with nothing but lamps adorning the walls. The lamp shades were from a different time, and the end tables were made out of a wood I knew was no longer around on the earth anymore. I walked away from it, if that made sense. Sure, the lamps didn't stop coming, but I was definitely walking down a vestibule of some kind that led to something other than ancient lamps from different times. The farther I walked, the more sounds began to appear. It started with my footsteps, then the sound of my breath, and eventually I could hear my voice as I lowly hummed a tune to calm me down. I wondered where I was. I wondered if I was safe at all in the hallway of lamps.
       "Hello!"
       The voice wasn't mine. I jostled my Enforcer knife, pausing my steps as the cheery voice echoed. With its echo, the lamps began to shake. They had ancient light bulbs, ones that would shatter at high sounds. Glass used to be used for that kind of thing, and I wondered if that was even feasible technology anymore. Maybe people had those kinds of lamps as antiques, but I couldn't think of a time even back to three thousand years prior to when we used that kind of thing for lamps. Or anything. Glass was fragile, so why would you dare use it? That didn't matter and I didn't know why I was having an eternal argument about it in my head, but it I continued to forget about the shaking lamps to argue over glass with myself.
       "The human mind is a fragile thing. I don't think he was ready."
       A tiny wisp of... something passed by my face, something tiny enough to not be seen. It glowed like fireflies had done, but it glowed pink. It was talking in its pipsqueak voice, shaking the lamps. I immediately grabbed it and covered its mouth.
       "Shh!" I whispered loudly. "You'll shatter the glass!" It bit me. Hard. I pulled away and noticed my hand began to drip blood. I was dead, so I didn't understand why I dripping any kind of blood. I turned back to the creature, and it became a human doused in the color pink with dragonfly wings attached to its back. It was naked, but it didn't even have body parts for me to shield my eyes with. I was astonished, staring into its swooping hair as every strand flowed like it had no gravity.
       "Firstien, right?" they asked me. "Look, the lamps won't break. Not anytime soon, anyway."
       I didn't react, but I voiced a question. "What are you? You look like something back from a time long gone."
       "I am. I've been gone for thousands of years, buried deep beneath your virtual skyscrapers and fake earth you pride yourselves in." They were annoyed by their own description, it seemed. "My name is Giartt Noginah, dead heir to the Faes that lie low beneath you. Do you know of the Faes, Firstien?"
       "The stories made up for children?" Faes were pure myth made up to instigate a sense of wonder in the youth, but they're quickly banished from talk as adults. Mere stories, I called them. "I know of those Faes."
       "1600s. We existed in the 1600s." There was a sense of dread in their speech.
       The 1600s was so long ago that I didn't think I could have any relatives from the time. The year was 9,157. It felt...
       "Ancient." The word slipped out.
       "Yes, ancient. You seem to used that word quite often, even with yourself." The smirk on their face was hard to miss. "That's not what matters, however. I suppose as the first Center, I need to explain a few things."
       Center. That's what the man had said before stabbing me in my heart. 
       Giartt had stretched out their pink wings and closed them rapidly. A gust of air came from the instant swoosh, and every lamp had begun to shatter in droves. One by one they all had made glass fall to the floor, and Giartt had suddenly crunched them into their bare toes. They bled yellow blood, something I've never even seen before, and their blood began to rise into the air. It formed an expansive picture that plastered itself to the wall. It seemed to make out a city made of wooden pyres and people just like Giartt with the long wings traversing the streets below, and they all had been surrounded by the wooded trees that stretched widely across the blue sky. It was a picture that almost seemed real.
       Faes. Yes, Faes were a subspecies of human, and they were told through stories to be half-bug creatures that had powers beyond any extension with machinery. They were all androgynous creatures. That's what the children stories had told, at least. I turned my attention to Giartt who was staring into my eyes like a moth staring into the flame they was attracted to. There was something inside of them, something that wanted to tell me more about the picture made from their Fae blood.  
       "The Center is a long line running, and it's exactly what it means," they told me. "You are the center of everything, Firstien. I once was, but we do not live forever."
       I crossed my arms, wiping a bit of the blood from their bite earlier. "What exactly do you mean the center of everything?"
       "There's a person out there, one with the life to live just like you. Everyone has an individual story, as you know, but what if I told you that all of that depends on you and your life?"
        "My life? My life is simple, you know. I lost my wife, most people do since the complications at birth are almost too prevalent since the new Minister took control, and I have a son while working a government job as an Enforcer."
        "That's not what I mean. Your life is terribly boring, and that's not what matters. I'm talking about every living breath you've ever taken. That's what matters." They had the eyes speckled with white like the stories told. They seemed to be glossed with a sense of tears. "If you die, Firstien, the whole world disappears with you. Even your closest family is just a part of the big world, and that's all they'll ever be."
       "What do you mean? If I die, everything else disappears?"
       "There is no life after death. Not if the Center dies."
       I couldn't believe it. There was no way that I was chosen to keep the world afloat like that if it even worked that way. The world had to move on after someone died. There was just no way that I had all that power, and there was no way my son or anyone was just... gone. If it really worked like that, how did I move on after my wife? What was a Center, anyway?
       The picture out of blood dissolved into a large oval. It led to nothing or what looked like more wall than anything else. Giartt turned back to me. "The Center is supposed to save the world from getting too far. Like yours."
        A world that's gone too far. I could think of many reasons as to how it had gone too far, but one of the more prevalent ones was that there were few too many trees left on the whole earth. I struggled to find a rebuttal as my mind drifted.
        "Firstien, can I ask you something?" they asked, taking a hand and placing it on my shoulder. 
       I nodded. "Go ahead."
       "How long do you want to stay in this place filled with broken lamps and Fae blood adorning the wall? I can take you back home, back to the beginning of the day or the beginning of time if you wish. All you have to do is promise me that you're going to fix what's broken."
       "What's broken?" I asked. "What do I have to do to be the Center in the first place?"
       The blood began to turn black, forming a portal to somewhere beyond. Giartt motioned to it like it was safe, but I was hesitant. In my head, I was supposed to be dead, walking the planes with my wife while staring down at my son's progress. I guess I wasn't going to die yet, was I? There was a part of me asking for my life to be over in some way because I knew that it might have been time as a 43 year-old Enforcer, but I was given this chance. I took a few shaky steps towards the blackness.
       "For now, let's go back to the beginning of the day."
       He shoved me into the darkness where my voice no longer made any noises. This time, however, I felt like I was going somewhere. I could feel wind moving passed my shoulders as my feet slowly walked into the dark void, and it almost felt surreal. Like none of it was real. I didn't want it to be. I wanted it to be a dream that I made up in my head or something. Some nights, I would dream of Mavara at my side along with Ogillitiy. Maybe this was something similar.
       I had a strange suspicion that it wasn't.
       I was soon brought to light yet again as I was when I entered the room with the lamps. It burned my eyes, and I didn't see anything at all for a long while. But I felt the tablecloth on the kitchen table. I felt the coffee cup warming my hand, and I heard the sound of my son's voice as he tried telling me the premise of his story. He was reading away at it, and then came the line.
       "It must've been the year 4065, much far back to when we as people had begun to learn all the ethics of humanity. A man, bitter and afraid to be alive, had sauntered the streets much like we always had done on cold winter days. His yellow eyes were set on one foreboding thing: the end of humanity itself."
       I opened my eyes, staring into his brown irises like I had done before. It wasn't a dream. I really died to a stab wound and saw a real Fae in a hallway full of old lamps.
       "It was well-written as always, Ogillitiy," I managed to tell him. Instead of half-listening like I did before, I heard every word as if I would never hear them again. My voice picked up just the same, very gruff as I sipped on my coffee like nothing was wrong. "What's it about?" I didn't have to ask.
       I already did in a different timeline, one where I would die to a man named Brokilna Sobe that knew I was a Center.