[LolitaBonanza]: 762.AnotherModernPrometheus.0

I’d never died before.
Overall, I would say people glamorize the experience. At first, there was a prickling. My body relaxed into numbness. Then a calm settled in my belly that crawled like a vine up my esophagus. My senses shut down, one by one, and the world began crumbling away from me. I was a ripple; my mind was leaking out of my body tremor by tiny tremor until eventually, I was finished.
Everything was black. Not dark, not faded. Black. Black as in nothing. Black as in an absence of anything. The blackiest black you’ve ever blacked. Seen, that is. Or, better yet, not seen.
The black is important to understand. Most people overlooked the black when I told them. They said I simply could no longer see anything, that my sense of sight had stopped functioning. But they were wrong, of course. They assumed I was slipping away from the world, but in reality, the world was slipping away from me.
But what do I know. I was only the one lying on my belly, slowly croaking out of existence.
That was the only time I died properly. Usually, my body’s pumped full of chemicals and I fall asleep, and I wake up remembering nothing and feeling like I had tried to hug a speeding train. I don’t count those as deaths.
But getting stepped on by a clean, white sneaker and having your body spread over the linoleum like butter on toast? That’s a death.
They told me I was lucky. I shouldn’t have come back, they said. I should’ve been dead, and all our work ruined. But I was alive. “Proof that there’s a God!” Christian had said.
I know better than to listen to anything Christian says.
The last thing I remember is the smell of my death. A pungent mixture of hand sanitizer and plastic had wafted into my nostrils. Sterile, I believe is the word. There was also something…metallic. There was, also, my own aroma: the resulting stench of the various liquids that had been oozing from my body for nearly fifteen minutes.
Then I died. It was like falling asleep. Only when I drifted into my eternal snooze, I felt the nothing that had surrounded me. Because there was nothing. And I was part of that nothing.
Thinking back on it now scares the shit out of me.
I’m told other people see a bright light and loved ones greet them cheerfully. Something like a birthday party being thrown in front of a solar system being sucked into a black hole. These are, of course, the accounts of people who’ve nearly died. I, on the other hand, did die. And I’m in no sense of the word a person. Or at least I wasn’t at the time. Amphibians aren’t people.