Flash: Hourglass

Trigger Warning: This piece of flash fiction explores themes of depression, self-harm, and surreal horror. Reader discretion is advised.

Hourglass

The apartment was down to a sheet set on the floor, marking the area for sleep. A pillow covered in a towel. A rambler for water placed on a small coffee table with a spoon angled at its side. His laptop, plugged into the wall socket, sat on top. A modem, router, and its cable mess snaking in the corner. An overhead lamp. Control for the air conditioner mounted on the wall. A few pieces of clothing draped on the floor in the closet. A single pair of shoes. A dull knife and an old sponge in the kitchen. A toothbrush. Some basic toiletries to the left of the bathroom sink, stood in lonely defiance.

He had been methodically shedding his belongings over the past few months, listing them on eBay, one by one. It started as a welcome distraction, the TV, the stereo, the books, the magazines that once filled the shelves sold and shipped away. Then the furniture followed piece by piece until the apartment was stripped bare. Everything was a memory, and everything had to go. He sold what he could, gave away the rest.

The pantry was down to a single box of dehydrated mashed potatoes. He'd mix them with room-temperature water in his rambler, eating them cold, because somehow that seemed fitting. Potatoes were simple, sustaining, though he no longer knew what he needed to be sustained for. The silence was a thing alive. It crawled along the walls, seeped into the cracks, nestled in the corners.

It wasn't just the things that were gone, it was everything, and everything was everywhere, even in the absence, in the stillness. The apartment, his mind, felt like a mausoleum. Each bare space a monument. He thought he could erase them all, calm his mind. He erasing the things, but they lingered. The emptiness gnawed him, hollowing him out. The walls seemed to pulse with heavy air. The silence pressed in on him like a weight, a dark seed spreading its roots through his veins.

Nearly finished with his eBay and donation runs, he began spending hours on grave plot websites, browsing listings for headstones and manicured lawns. His mind numbed by the monotony brought by the endless scrolling. The sites all looked nearly the same, simple and somber interfaces.

Each plot was accompanied by a brief description-Peaceful rest, Serene Meadow, Eternal View. The names blurred together after a while, but he kept clicking through the options as he was shopping for something ordinary, something mundane. He found himself lingering on certain plots, the prices varied, but it wasn't about the money. It was about finding the right place, the place where he could finally stop and rest. Yet, each time he shut down his laptop, he felt no closer to decision, only more certain that one day he would end up there, just another name carved into stone.

Standing in the middle of the living room, staring at the empty space where the couch had been, the silence hummed in his skull a low, insistent thrum. He walked to the kitchen, pulled a dull knife from its drawer, and returned to the room. The knife was heavy in his hand. It wasn't just the apartment that was empty. It was also him. He wrapped himself in the sheet on the floor, a caricature of a ghost.

He pressed the blade to his wrist, not out of desire to die, but to feel something, something real, something that would prove that he was still alive. But as the blade broke the skin, there was no blood, only sand. Fine, dry grains spilled from the opening, cascading over his hand, pooling at his feet. They continued to pour out.

He stared down at them, uncomprehending, as the sand continued to flow, faster and faster as if it had been waiting for this moment. He could feel the sand taking him in, filling him in, choking off the last of his breath. Sand filled the room, pouring into his mouth now, his lungs, raising up around him, burying the last of what was real, walls crumbled into dunes. The ceiling dissolved into a sky of the color of ash.

Everything was gone now, replaced by an endless desert, barren, desolate, stretching into eternity. Only the wind remained, carrying everything away, the last grains that had once been him, scattering them into the void, leaving nothing behind but silence.

Cold clarity settled in. There was no relief, no release - only an infinity from which he could never escape.

// Zero Strike