How Your World Ends

A Fibonacci series flash

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Keith Powell

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baDUM. baDUM. Heart attack? You lurch outside. The bar’s back alley beckons. You
worry you might die in secret here. People will find your pickled corpse between
garbage cans and crushed cigarette butts. People will tut-tut that that’s the price one
pays for a life squandered chasing drink and cheap delights in the dark. Every sensation
is a violent, overwhelming cacophony battering a brain already screaming doom. You
imagine your heart a gauge spitting steam. You picture blood vessels popping. Bowels
rupturing filth. Deep breaths. In. Out.

You survive.

Cautious days pass. Let’s pretend it never happened. Diminish the memory of that
mysterious, smothering terror. Nothing to see here, people. Move along now. A blip.
Right?

No.

Unpredictable, unreasonable. Shrieking phantom terror. Almost overnight, your life
contracts. Yoked and cowed by a hysterical panic response. These public collapses
winnow your world down to a handful of safe zones. Travel between these sacred
islands is a harrowing gamble that you will repeatedly lose in humiliating fashion to
palpitations and dread.

Each day leaves some new precious debris in its wake, abandoned grocery carts,
conversations, perplexed friends and waiters, ticket stubs, your wife, your self-respect
and pride, any sliver of hope for a meaningful future.

Years pass, and you gradually adopt a hollowing new mantra: This is your life now, this
is your life now, this is your life now, this is your life now, this is your life now, this is your
life now, so cherish these meager crumbs because this is all your vanishing life will ever
be.

Maintaining even this wilted existence requires meticulous calculations—a series of fibs
papering over sudden absences, agonizing excursions cloistered in shame, rich in
black-eyed loneliness and regret for missed experiences you can’t get back.

Your psychiatrist sits like a bubbly blonde Melfi and suggests running or yoga or anti-
depressants or deep breathing or Chamomile tea.

Don’t worry, no one has ever died of a panic attack. She smiles. Are you thinking of
harming yourself? she asks.

It takes effort to know. To really know. Deep breaths. No. Yes.

__________

Keith Powell is a writer and editor based in Ohio. He is co-founder and managing editor of Your Impossible Voice and the author of the flash fiction chapbook Sweet Nothings Are a Diary If You Know How to Read Them (ELJ Editions).

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