Writing With Hope

What Death Looks Like: A Short Story

Posted on January 10, 2017 Updated on January 11, 2017

[Warning: Not a Typical ‘Lil Pick Me Up’  Post]

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The decaying fabric of his skin was melting off his bones, like wax off a long lit candle, and the whites of his eyes downgraded to a shade of gray with veins now elevated, making them bulge from the sockets.

He was everything in a macabre play and more.

I wanted to run out of the goddamn room. The smell of corrosion in the air ran chills up my spine and made me selfishly elated because I was still alive. And what was so shitty, was the honest fact that I didn’t want to trade places with the man.

On the contrary, I was delighted that I wasn’t where he was.

His ordinarily blue eyes were now muted by the oncoming of death. The slow drip of his skin, sliding off his bones made my stepdad nothing more than a skeletal horror show.

This once pop-belly man swine, oversized, and one who ate way too much, now stared at me with a freakish look, perhaps one of embarrassment. Recollecting, immediately as I entered the room for the first time, not seeing him since before the incident. He used one feeble, skeletal hand in attempt to cover himself. He was trying to be modest in all his ugliness and dying.

So I finally coughed out, “Would you like me to cover you?” I could barely say anything else because the stink of death stalked the room, evaporating any available space for life. My step dad nodded, just enough for me to register that he indeed wanted to be covered up. I was surprised that he could comprehend this much because he was engulfed in decomposition.

Death arrested my throat and made me want to fucking gag.

I took a towel and covered where his knees and gown met, a slight opening that might show his dying dick. Like, everything else on him, he was fucking expiring and what was the point in proper manners now? Regardless, I respected his insistence for decency.

Still, he honestly frightened and also repulsed me. But my mind quickly vacationed to the past, where I recall mom nagging him, “Don’t order that, it’s not good for you.”

“So, you’re going to tell me what I’m going to eat? You’re going to control my body?” he’d say, challenging my mother’s dictatorial personality. But, in the end, his stubbornness won.

She eventually realized that she didn’t have power over him. Except now, she’s got to wipe his ass every time he shits. Mom has to bathe him and feed him and put him to bed. He is more than just a child. He is a human shell with an active mind living in a body praying to die. And the first moment I saw him, I was disgusted.

I wanted to vomit.

I wanted to run out of there and I wanted to escape.

There was only one thought running through my head.

Death is disgusting.  

Death is ugly.  

Death is a lonely, final stage.

Dying is the result of how we’ve lived, love it or hate it. We all have to die, and all I could see was that dying was pure shit.

My step-dad’s sagging skin and lost look, he was a hollow shell of a human with a ready brain but a body that couldn’t deliver. I only had one prayer and one final wish for him:

Please die peacefully and die quickly because dying is a fucking bitch.

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NOTE TO READERS: IF YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE IN PAIN, DON’T ABUSE YOUR BODY.

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