Would it be better if he just stopped breathing? He tried sometimes, in the still of the night, but it was as hard as just choosing to stop should be. His head hummed, his vision swarmed with something like black flies closing in, and he always gave up in the end, gasping and pushing out even more death for how he had tried to stop.
There were other ways of stopping, of course. But breathing was the problem, so it only seemed right to start with that. Besides- and he could admit this to himself in the still of the night- he was afraid. Most of the other, faster, surer ways of stopping were messy and horrible.
As if it hadn’t been horrible for the people he breathed near. The house creaked with emptiness. The streets hummed with silence, as if their own swarms of fainting black flies were about to descend. Maybe those were what rushed out of his lungs.
Maybe they were what had choked his parents, and the neighbours, and their neighbours. He couldn’t see them, but he had seen how neighbours after neighbours, and people who just walked down the street, stopped and clawed at their throats. How they stared at him, like they were just as afraid in the few seconds before they fell.
Then the people who had come to take him away. He had hidden from them at first, from everywhere their sleek black cars could take him. Later, he had packed a suitcase. He’d found it in his parents’ closet and filled it with most of his clothes, a few of his books, and put it by the door, but none of the people who’d come for him had made it up the driveway yet. Even the last ones, who’d worn masks, hadn’t made it as far as the porch.
Maybe he had breathed too much, and it was too thick now. Maybe it was spreading everywhere.
Maybe, if he didn’t bother taking his suitcase but just stood outside at the end of the driveway, the next people who came would stop him.
