The Air, We Breathe

There is a gasp, but air doesn't seem to fill the lungs the way it should. It is perceptible enough to know something is wrong, but close enough to the normalcy of breathing that one doesn't quite feel too alarmed. Then the breathing goes back to normal.

Moments pass by, enough of them in which one would forget of the mishap that happened. It was only mildly inconvenient, to say the least, but it should have alarmed them that something more severe were to follow. Still, continue on, one must.

It always comes at quite an inopportune time. There is never really an opportune time, one wouldn't imagine, but while paying for coffee and without any indication would most certainly constitute as an inopportune time. Another gasp. This time worse than the one moments before. Was it an hour before? Was it the day before? Either way, enough time had passed that it came on without triggering any kind of connection to the previous, though this one slightly worse than before, and when the air was finally regained the memory of how much time had elapsed is gone. All they know is how many people are looking at them.

"You should go to a doctor," a patron of the fine book store says to him.

Bookstore, he thinks to himself. I thought I was buying coffee?

He composes himself and walks on, placing the books he had in his hand on a nearby shelf before exited the front of the store.

Another bit of moment passes by without incident. He thinks about going to see a doctor, but things seem all too fine now to bother. What would he do, anyway? Go to the emergency room over a bit of a loss of breathe?

So he carries on his way, finding his way home. He notices a car in the driveway that he doesn't recognize. Maybe one of his friends, or maybe his sister, got a new vehicle and they are coming to show it off. He goes to the door and fumbles his keychain until he finds what looks remotely like his house key, yet it doesn't slide into place the way it should. He tries another. And another. And another, but before he can find the right one a person is answering the door. "Hey, Jim. Come on in. I will call your daughter and let her know you're lost again."

Lost again?

Nothing about the house is familiar. The furniture looks like some kind of science fiction prop, and a television suspends itself from the wall, unlike anything he has seen before. The confusion sets in and he starts to feel angry.

"Where is my chair? The red chair that should be here," and he points to a corner that now has an L shaped couch and an ottoman within itself, black leather withe a collapsible headrest carrying itself around the entire top. Jim has never seen anything like it.

He gasps for air again.

He looks back up to find himself surrounded by his children. All grown. The floral decorations on the wall are atrocious, and it smells of shit mixed with butterscotch candy. Literal shit, that is, because as Jim is now realizing, he shit himself.

Where the fuck am I? Why are my kids so old? His kids, the youngest now near sixty with the oldest in their seventies, have aged as all humans have aged. Yet, Jim wonders how he can be so young with children that are older than he is.

He remembers gasping for air a moment ago, before being in this room with shit in his pants. His panic sets in again, and before he knows it he goes back into a full blown gasping attack.

Jim never comes back from that gasping attack. Or, at least, his brain never recovers from it. He becomes barely more than a vegetable with the ability to occasionally utter a random word from a memory he can't quite grasp onto. These truly are the final days for him, and while his kids grasp onto any and all memories of their father they can, with the grandkids and great grandchildren all making preparations as best they can, a family finds themselves beginning the grieving process in a way in which they didn't fully comprehend was possible.

He will gasp for air one last time. Maybe in an hour, maybe in the next couple of days, but it will be one final time. And when he does, with him his confusion, too, shall disappear, as locked somewhere deep inside his mind is something desperately trying to make sense of why he didn't go to the doctor when he gasped for air that very first time.

-Dustin S. Stover