I wrote this in my last year of college, with some grander story planned around it. It was inspired by a strange out-of-body experience that matched the first 2.5 paragraphs pretty closely and never came up again. It was going to get very weird, but looking at it with fresh eyes, I don’t really think it was that great a setup.
Feb 12
Today was a normal day. Having finished or ditched all of my classes, I was walking to the job fair in my finest and only-est suit. Considering the -10° Fahrenheit windchill, another layer would have made the outfit more practical. I had just crossed the street next to my dorm and started towards the center of campus when I felt something, which was weird, because my body was already numb from the cold.
No, I felt something else – a twinge of foreboding, like I had lost something that I couldn’t remember ever having. I checked my pockets for my phone and wallet, finding both where they were meant to be. My keys were there, too. Looking down, I felt around my back pockets idly, hoping to remember if I was supposed to have something in them. I don’t know what I was thinking, I never keep anything in my back pockets.
As that realization dawned on me, my foot caught in a crack. I glanced up to see an oncoming bus and stumbled to regain my balance. With one hand gripping my resumé portfolio and the other still caught in my back pocket, I didn’t have a lot to work with. I managed to stand up just in time to see myself, in third person, stumble into the street. When I was halfway to the ground, the bus made contact. Silently. I went limp and bounced forward in the street; whatever was left of me was macerated under 3 sets of heavy-duty tires. The bus drove on, unimpeded.
I stood just past the murderous sidewalk crack, blinking as the noise from the bus faded into the distance. My doppleganger’s suit was ruined, for sure, along with his skull and torso. More worrying, my cadaver began to fade. I’m not sure how long it took, but soon enough it was gone, bloodstains and all. I looked down at myself, my actual self. My suit looked fine from here. I was still cold, the shock hadn’t done much for that, but my mind was racing.
I had just seen myself die. Gruesomely. In third person. I started feeling myself. Checking my head, then my arms and chest for holes or tread marks. Nothing. Solid. I had to be a ghost. This was the afterlife. Nothing else could explain what had happened, as far as I knew. I kept walking. I had somewhere to be, after all, and until I was sure I was dead, the business of the living remained.
At the first crosswalk, I hit the signal button. A lone student walking up to the corner nodded to me. I wasn’t invisible, at least to him. I made it to a waiting southbound shuttle, greeted the driver and another rider, and sat. It was quickly becoming apparent that this was still the real world. Even on the walk over, oncoming walkers had moved to let me pass, which ruined the ghost theory completely.
Maybe it was a fluke. An extremely vivid, visceral fluke in which I saw myself get crushed by a bus. It happens, right?
Right?
Feb 15
It happened again. I was only a few feet out the door when I slipped on a patch of black ice and fell headfirst onto the corner of a brick wall. The blood splatter was excessive, like a watermelon getting smashed with a hammer. Gallagher would have been proud if he had been present and also a serial murderer. Just like last time, I remained standing until the scene faded. The real me was still fine, but what if the dead ones aren’t just impostors?
Feb 22
6 times today. Run over by 2 cars, crushed by a structurally unsound tree, electrocuted by a defective high-tension transformer, dropped into an apparently closed sewer, and was stricken with an aneurysm on my way to lunch. I don’t even react anymore. I just keep walking. If I try to touch the duplicate me, it dissipates like heavy smoke being fanned away.
I’ve been searching online to figure out what’s happening. Everyone says to see a psychiatrist or an exorcist. Sometimes both.
Sometimes I’m thankful for the images. Not that they ever get easier, but at least I can see how much worse things could get. Seeing yourself die over and over can really put the value of life into perspective.
Feb 26
Other people are dying now. I mean, they’re always dying, but usually it’s permanent and not right in front of me. The whole performance is turning comical, like whatever is doing this is running out of believable ways for people to die while going about their business. I saw everyone on the quad have synchronized heart attacks earlier, all collapsing and not collapsing in unison. There was this moment when their doubles stopped walking and froze, and for a moment the real people disappeared. When the living started to reappear, I stopped worrying and walked through my corpse.
This is going to get really ugly when I go home for break. I’ve got a few months until that happens, though.
Mar 1
It finally happened. Worst-case scenario. Everyone died. I was walking to my first class when every disaster possible happened at once. Trees fell, electrical lines burst, the ground opened up and geysers boiled a few of the unlucky ones, from what I can tell. When it stopped, I waited for the living versions to reappear, for the surreal to return to the mundane. It just didn’t happen.
There was no point in going to class. I went back to the dorm to see what I was working with.
Profanity Filter Testing Domain 