The Wishing Star

I wished for the death of my enemies, yet I find myself in the afterlife. I remember the burn of the flesh melting off my bones when the asteroid crashed, yet there is no sign of harm on my body.

Met with blank, empty space all around me, unease floods my lungs. I pick a direction and walk. A while passes, then another, but nothing stops me. Nothing is there to stop me. And nobody, not even my own shadow. I follow a path I determined is mine, but aching legs force me to rest after thousands of heavy steps. I do not know the distance I walked, as there are no marks for me to direct myself by.

I sit down on – I suppose one could call it the floor – but it is the same as everything else, a nothingness. The world shifts around me as I stare off into the distance. I now sit in a classroom of my elementary school. I remember this, yes, this is where I made my first enemy. A contest unfairly won, or so I believed, he offers his hand to me for a handshake, an invitation to friendship. I refuse it. I yell. The teacher scolds me. We spend the next years fighting.

My surroundings change again. A lonesome teenager, a pack of jocks throwing rocks at me during lunchtime. A girl fights them off. Such humiliation. I refuse her friendship too. She is hurt, but I do not regret it. Not back then, at least. I never even learned her name.

Then, a memory I do not recognize, one that is not mine. Is it? I am older, much older than when I died. My thirties, perhaps, or forties. I stand in line. A woman talks to me, the words blur together into a pointless babble of nonsense that I am disinterested in. I tell her to shut her mouth, meeting the disdainful glare of the cashier as I pay for my cigarettes. A lifelong habit by now. I walk away, the reflection showing the sad woman I left behind.

As the pains of age spread through my body, I find myself in a filthy apartment, lying in a foul smelling bed. Unwashed laundry on the floor and dirty dishes stacked around the kitchen. No wife or children to be happy with, only the bitterness of my nearing last breaths.

I shake my head, waking up from those recollections. The blankness of my surroundings before now turned into a narrow corridor, lit by the sharp glare of ceiling lights. I have no choice but to walk again, forward. This time, I reach a tall mirror at the end. I study my reflection, tired, but still youthful. It moves on its own, reaching its hand to me through the glass, a helping gesture.

I ball my hand into a fist and break the mirror. As first blood reaches the ground, I know that it has always been my fault. I deserve this.