How many bullets had it taken to kill me?

Dennis had arrived at Starbucks that morning, running late as usual.  It was normally his fault.  He would get up late, after hitting the snooze bar four, maybe five, times.  Today it was seven times.

He tried to get his mind around that now, how long was seven times?  Was it an hour?  What was the length of each snooze period?  He had known that, he was sure…but that was before he had died.  Not dying, no, dead.

The dying part had been ugly.

After getting his large black with half and half cream, Dennis had walked back to his slightly used Volkswagen Jetta.  When he fumbled his keys he had heard someone make a noise.  It had sounded like someone clearing their throat.  So he turned to find a man standing there.  This man was young, but looked old.  He looked beat up, and something about the face reminded Dennis of what death must have to wear around his soul all the time.  Some strange sense of fate and fear. 

There had been a flash and a loud pop.  Dennis hadn’t even really noticed the gun.  Hadn’t even noticed anything at first.

The bullet had leapt up at him and stuck him under the left nipple.  Traveling at an upward right angle it had entered the left atrium and ruptured Dennis’ heart. 

The bullet then slipped through the soft tissue and struck a rib only a few millimeters from his spine.  The bullet exploded the bone and both bone and bullet fragments erupted through a silver dollar size hole out his back.

Dennis had no idea that the wound was so.  He had only been concerned with the strange wallop that seemed to buckle his knees as if his very lungs had been collapsed.  He fell straight down, unable to get his hands out at all to slow his quick descent.  He felt his head clatter against the asphalt, a moment of dimness drifted across his eyes and then it was gone.

His coffee was flung up and over his legs and bare arms, where it burned his skin.  As those first indicators of pain reached his brain, the truth about his wounds was brought up into him as well.  Deep quicksilver stakes of pain raced along his neurons and invaded his brain.  Then the darkness burned his eyes.  He felt hot tears on his face.  He was sure that he was about to go into the dark and be lost forever in it.  Sure that something like a coma would over take him.

His head had landed so that he could see the wheel of his own car.  He now saw it begin to pull out of the parking lot.  If the pain hadn’t been so, he was sure that he could have found that interesting.  But it was killing him.

For those first few moments he gasped for breath, as his lungs continued to work, unknown to them that the heart was just pumping itself dry of blood, filling his body cavity with blood.  Those lungs had burnt too.  They wanted to continue.  They wanted to do what they had been designed for.  But it was useless.

Then the heart stopped, with a bigger shudder of pain that felt like his heart was now missing from the body, ripped out and as it left the body pulling the tendrils of veins and nerves to the very soles of his feet.

Then his lungs to failed and he lay there, scared, knowing what was coming.  Scared and hurt and even though he could see and hear the people running about him…some how he felt isolated and completely alone.

Then the pain had left.  It had been washed away, like rain does with a stale air, it just seemed to vanish, and was replaced by something close to pleasure.

His fear too was drifting away.   It had been as if such a thing like fear had never existed.   He could almost imagine it like watching an airplane sailing across the sky, disappearing over the distant horizon.

At some point he voided himself and he felt a bubble of disgust and embarrassment climb up to his mind, but they were suddenly popped, like so many other bubbles of his life.  At first those bubbles had been like rolling boiling water.  It had foamed and burned and everything came flooding up at once.  A bubble of some car he owned in high school.  A bubble of its color.  A bubble of prom.  A bubble of History with Mr. Morris.  Then pop, pop, pop!  They disappeared and were replaced by new memories who were instantly vanishing back into the dark.

Now, he was dead, of this he was vaguely sure.  He thought about it, but it was impossible to string words together in his mind.   He wondered at some sound he heard climbing in through the darkness.  Was it crying he heard or laughter?  Was it sadness that someone out there was uttering or was it love and salutations for great glory?  And how could he hear this? And what was out there? 

His mind grew foggy and diluted.  Drunk on pending death it leeched up into him.  Consciousness and unconsciousness becoming one thing, impossible to distinguish.  He tried to remember what the pictures of his life were, but he had no words for anything that was dancing around in his mind.  The fires of life burned away like so many scraps of news clippings.  Pictures of people that could have been his mother and father.  Pictures of girls.  Pictures of places he might have been.  But all of it was stuff he couldn’t understand. Stuff that he might have done mixed in with things he had done, then things that he had seen, things that actors had done. Nothing was lucid and real.  Just colors on the dark wall.  Just blurry images of reflections of mirrors going on forever.

Then those fleeting electrical sparks, those memories, burnt away.  And in their smoke, Dennis was gone.