MORTALITY

The rapid flashing illumination of the ambulance lights explode in my darkened room, like the landing lights of some unwanted alien craft. The helo, crouching ten feet off the nearby pad, makes the windows tremble like a first kiss; the high-pitched whine screaming angrily at nothing and everything. I suppose it's only right that I come face to face with the question of my own mortality.
The fact of the matter is, I can die. I have a definite end, just as sure as I had a definite beginning; an X and a Y on a calendar page tossed out in the trash decades ago. We all do. It's our common thread. Skin color may differ; mass and mental energy are but quotients in the problem. But we are all going to die. It has almost happened before, and it will almost happen again. I've come within inches of falling from the top of a concrete silo, and a hair’s width from combining my own atoms with those found on the front of a fast moving bus. Every day I wake up just a few hours older, a little further along the path. Ahead in evolution, behind in the rent. And when I go to bed at night, I think to myself, "You got lucky today, kid. But don't get cocky."
It's going to happen, it's just a matter of when. Maybe I will die of old age. Withered and small, gray haired and brittle; my descendants will gather around me, hold my hand, and see me off at the pier before I board the ship to the great unknown. I will leave behind a mountain of ink-drenched, dog-eared journals, a million miles worth of passports, wise words for the next traveler to navigate by, my trusty black boots, and very little else of value. A younger hand containing but a trace of my own DNA will close my eyes for me, and only one of us will leave the room. My picture will fade, and maybe one thing, one thing, I've said will be remembered, or of any use.
Or maybe the moment will hit with a comic suddenness. So totally out of the blue, catching me with such surprise that I will willingly take the hand of the End Man.
"You really got me good that time, man," I'll laugh. We’ll give each other a high five as we walk down the road to the cosmic bus stop.
Will I drown in the sea I love? Burst into flames and get my name in the books as one of those weird cases of spontaneous combustion? Will I fall from a great height, pumping my arms like a fool? Shit, why question it?
I can feel the pressure in the room pick up, the blades on that big bird spinning faster still. The ambulance rolls quietly down the block, lights smashing against the windows of my neighbors' homes, tossing flash bang grenades of mortality into quiet evenings everywhere.
The End Man sits at a table somewhere, eyeing the clock and snapping his deck of cards into a fedora across the room, one by one. And when he gets to the last card, he'll hold it up and read the name aloud. The force of his breath makes you shudder, wherever you are. He'll kick his feet off his desk and grab his coat from the hook, heading out into the night.
Don't ask me what the name on the door says. You don't want to know.