[This story of mine was published by Waxing and Waning today. I'll include an excerpt below, but follow the link at the end to read about the ways in which four beings experience bizarre deaths.]
"He sits with his thoughts in the burning room, the black, acrid smoke billowing up around him. He wonders when the fire will become a part of him; he wonders when he will become a part of the fire. Is this body of sagging skin, weak bone, collapsed muscle, and slow synapses made more of smoke or the reds and oranges of the flame? Will he burn fast or will he burn slow? What will his first thoughts be when the flame licks at the dermis, turns it red, then blackens as it rips its way across his surface? Will he scream or will he swallow the flame and then suffer in forced silence, his throat a fire-coated desert?
The only sound filling his ears: the crackle of the fire touching every piece of wood, every surface, making the world pop and snap around him as little bits of flaming debris fill the air around him before fizzling out in the smoke. The air surrounding him feels pregnant, filled with heat and force and weight. It consumes the room, becomes the room, takes up residence in its corners and its floorboards. It coats the walls and the ceiling, becomes every piece of accouterments that once decorated the space and make the room its own. Frames of pictures become red waves suspended in the air, the images contained within slowly charring from the outside in.
He can see the walls taking on the ashen look he’s seen in so many shows and movies in the past. He can see the black ivy-like tendrils start at the floor and work their way up as if crawling to find fresh air somewhere near the top of the room. The wallpaper burns and curls, the old glue beneath it coming back to life under the heat before losing its stickiness altogether. The walls seem to fall in on themselves, but it is just the strips of wallpaper sliding off the surfaces, fainting into the flames and allowing themselves to be caught up in the burn like willing, atrophied victims.
Behind the wall, scorched framing and exposed wiring, the rubber coating of which begins to melt off in drips and puddles on the floor before being burned off. The smell mingles with the smoke and gives the air around him a tang he had not expected. The strength of the smell briefly overpowers his brain, supersedes the heat and the burn for a moment as his synapses fight to hold on to a memory the smell elicits. But time is not a luxury; the memory flashes against the inside of his mind before fizzing out and disintegrating as the fire does the same thing to various parts of his body.
He can hear his skin bubbling up, becoming little pockets of pink and pus, over the sound of the fire now raging around him within the room. He tries to focus his attention on the sound rather than the pain that seems to be less around him and more within him, burning him from the inside out. He sees red with his eyes, but in his mind, the heat is a blinding white that steals his vision and cripples his movement. His fingers curl up into themselves, melting together into some kind of strange hand deformity; a paddle, a fin, a reminder of what a pleasure it was to burn. There is no part of him that does not succumb to the flame; there is no part of him that does not succumb to the pain. He is a single, fiery nerve perpetually struck and inflamed.
He inhales the smoke, feels its thick and wispy texture fill him up, mingling with the heat that sears him from within. He can feel it snake down into holes formed by melt. If he looks down, he can see grey tendrils dancing outside the scorched holes of his body; is the smoke entering or exiting? He cannot tell.
Soon, his hands are gone, victims of the fire.
Soon, his legs are gone, victims of the flame.
Soon, there is no skin; he is melted muscle and charred skeleton sitting in the burning room.
Soon, the heat dissipates; in the charred room of black, the smoke is all that’s left.
Soon, there is no sound.
Soon, the room is quiet again, a mausoleum of ash and forgotten memory cemented into the blackened walls with his screams.
It didn’t know how long it had been falling. A minute? A day? A year? It spread its body out wide like a starfish, hoping to slow its descent through the air, but this only served to give the wind more surface to erode, more skin and sinew to eat away as it seemed to plummet without ever finding an end to it all.
The minute (or year) of falling continued on, unfettered by logical thought or action. The air changed temperature from cold to less cold. Its face hurt, its fingers seemed to scream their own agony, though it could barely bring them to its face to see their slow erosion, the air slicing its way through the webbing between digits and turning its calloused palms into bloody topographies of worlds once explored, but which it could barely remember anymore.
Another year passes as it falls through a squadron of thick clouds, stiffer and whiter in person than one might believe. It sees grey sky and darker clouds on the horizon and, for the briefest of moments, it wonders how it would feel to have the sky’s lightning flash and strike it and then course through its body. Would it light up like a firework and be emblazoned upon the memory of the skyline? Or would it simply be struck dead without so much as a thought to make the experience worth it?
A long day passes and still it tumbles ever downward, the earth below never seeming to get any closer. It feels the piercing wind against its face, feels the skin finally begin to give way and rip off in tiny pieces. Was that blood it felt across its face, blurring up its vision…or was it tears? Bits of skin rip, flayed off by the force, detach and fall alongside it, as if the pieces of its body want to fall into oblivion in tandem with it.
And on it falls, fast and hard through the blindingly blue sky and through dense clouds as the earth seems to remain far, far away. When would it stop falling? When would its skin stop getting flayed off? Soon, it had lost all its dermis, torn away by the whipping air. It had become a thing of bleeding muscle and tendon flying through the atmosphere, soon exposing nerves and feeling every gust.
Soon, the muscle begins disintegrating and falling off the bone. Its nerves begin whipping around in the air, knotting themselves up around the bones and joints and ligaments, making it impossible to move in any real, manageable way. It is now a prisoner to the air, accepting the slow torture of being ripped apart during flight.
Soon, the nerves dissolve and the skeleton fell, then fell apart, its bones clinking against each other. Like sand, the femurs and the tibias and the ball sockets and the hipbone and the breastplate all begin to fade away at the forced erosion. The earth is close now, but it wouldn’t know that. By the time its essence returns to its earthly home, it will become dust and that dust has been swallowed up by the eddying winds of the landscape, spreading its ashes far and wide.
Soon, the wind dies down, stills, quiets.
Soon, the horizon dims."
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