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Challenge of the Month XL
Above the body after death: Something all of us have heard or read about, or seen in documentaries or on film. Across human history, there has been one outlier that purely represents any given emotionally tied flashback that someone would have seen before dying: Good, bad, heartbreak, excitement, betrayal, or love that was not able to see itself through, and many more. Write a story or poem about this, the extreme outliers, both what they're flashing back to, and why they're about to die. Winning piece of ethereal lift and float gets the $100. Go.
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7v7
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The Outlier

Gripping the edge of the mattress, it is the Void that is calling. If you've ever fainted, then you know as I do what it means, to be so near Death. The slow withdrawal from this world is felt as a muffling of hearing, like being pulled inside a trunk, with the simultaneous dimming of vision, like in rapid Nightfall... a nulling of the senses, a vacuum in the chest. The panic and ecstasy that grips the flailing body and soul is the eternal suction of the Void drawing account of those enumerable things cheated from you... my Life. The steps I didn't take, the motions I negated, the dances I didn't dance, the romances and flights of fancy I denied, the calls I never made, the voice I could have raised while there was still semblance of chance, those tender precious words I failed to say or to write... Lying now just out of reach... the sum of Naught.

The Void reckons it all, like Debts. And in the final Act of the Drama the soliloquist is cut in the dead of the auditorium and drawn back behind the curtain like in a Dream, only partly revealed... to us.

While the din in the audience is raised, with clanking of coats, seats, and keys, hushed whispers tossed out into the darkness, looking for truths... "...What did it mean...?"

Everything. And Nothing.

06.03. 2023

Challenge XL @Prose

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