Author: Evan MacKay
It was cold. I knew it was cold even if I couldn’t feel it. I knew because my brain told me it was cold. They’d stuck me in the freezer after all. But I couldn’t feel. Oh Lord, I couldn’t feel. But the pain was gone. When they’d fried my nervous system they’d taken any chance of feeling pain with it. A blessing of sorts. A small one considering I was in a freezer, and dying. And I was dying. I knew that too. My brain told me it was so. How could I not be?
I thought back to what they’d said. Animatronic upgrades. Bones of steel, veins made of wire. I’d be stronger, faster, smarter. In every way the superior man. Ten thousand childhood daydreams come to life, a thousand novel and movie scripts made real. But they’d messed up, and now I was dying in the freezer. The knife had slipped. What had I expected when they’d brought me to an empty warehouse? But all the best science was performed in empty warehouses. Wasn’t that what the movies said? I’d believed the movies. Fuck the movies.
My legs were gone. They’d removed those first. The world went black while I sat there, that must mean the time was near. My time to die. I might have been crying, I couldn’t tell. They’d taken my legs off and now I was bleeding to death. Oh they’d tried to stop it. Tried about as hard as any scientist operating out of an empty warehouse would. But it hadn’t helped and now I was in a freezer.
I wonder what my wife will think. My ex-wife, I have to remind myself. I picture her now, as things had been before the divorce. It makes it a little easier, because I can feel that I am crying now, and I don’t want to die. I picture my wife and pretend that we’re not divorced, that we’re still a happy family with a dog and two cats. She’d taken the cats with her, which was fine because I hated them, but in my mind we’re all back together and I don’t even mind the cats that much. Which is a strange feeling.
Black again and then back again, which is an even stranger feeling. If I could move my head I’d look down. One last look at the legs that aren’t there. For a moment I imagine the scientists. I imagine all sorts of horrible things happening to them. Decapitations, car crashes, anything that is awful and terrible. They’re gruesome images I conjure up, but not nearly as gruesome as the image of half a man dying in a freezer.
It’s the third black and back and I know that the next one is THE one. The one that we spend our whole lives dreading. So I buckle up, dig in and imagine my wife and I not divorced, and her stupid cats, and gruesome, horrible things happening to those gruesome, horrible scientists. And as I close my eyes for what I know to be the last time I feel something strange. Peace.