Ames Death Wish

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 979-8-31783025-0
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 228 Seiten

Reihe: Death Wish

'And how, exactly, would you like to die?' Angie imagines the meetings, having never been invited to one. But that's not her role at Death Wish, where clients pay to die, planning elaborate exhibitions with their orchestrators so that they may 'go out on their terms,' or so they think. Working behind the scenes has taught Angie that everything has a cost and there are many ways to pay, and currencies to pay with...honesty and accountability, elusive qualities, Angie discovers, and not only for clients. Because Angie also has a wish, a craving for comprehension, a literacy of Life, to learn its many languages and understand them for herself. The origins. Because everything came from somewhere, something greater, with more energy, and she wants to learn about what that energy is. Sincerity is honored, as Angie can attest. No longer does she imagine the meetings, or Metresha's silky voice as it welcomes clients inside her obsidian-black study, showing them to a plush throne chair to prepare them for what, exactly, comes next. Angie is now an orchestrator, and her client is someone she happens to know. But both are unprepared for the repercussions of the exhibition they create-an immersive experience that individually adapts to each member of the audience, cast and crew included. It is during her own exhibition that Angie's wish is granted, and she is given a glimpse of what she wants to know. But knowledge is earned; she must be honest with herself about who she is and accountable for every choice-every thought, feeling, and action-in order to understand where she comes from. Angie loses her footing and falls, past and present blend together and dream blurs with reality. The truth, however, holds firm: For Angie, Death is not so far away.

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Autoren/Hrsg.

Ames, Aspen

Leseproben

Shadows

She opened her eyes. The light had shifted. It was darker . . . or was it? Look, the bright spots—there and there. She squinted, then relaxed, vision focusing, then blurring. She went back and forth with the strange new light, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The tone of it—yes, the tone. The tone was unfamiliar; it possessed new qualities that distorted her vision and perception; the color, depth and shading were all wrong. No—not wrong. Different, else, something unfamiliar. New. The light stymied her conditioned rods and cones; she felt the squirrely vessels throb inside the jelly, and she moved her head from side to side on the worn armrest, its tired, loose threads jabbing at her cheeks. For a moment, she’d forgotten where she was and how she came to be there. But the frayed fabric was a reminder, one detail out of many, and a familiar reality filled itself in; the loose pebble gave way to an avalanche of memory, and she remembered. She went back to the light, the changes fascinating and frightening. What was she seeing, and how was she seeing it? It had such dimension and depth, as if she could hold a bunching of it, or swim in its currents; yet it was weightless somehow. Weightless substance. She let her eyes frolic, feeling its form. Beyond the dust-covered glass of the front window, creamy streaks of orange light were pelting across a nebulous sky, and gray whiskers grew from dense dollops of fluffy clouds, floating high, high above where she lay. The skyscape swallowed her whole, and she felt a hollow insignificance sprout inside her belly.

But her mind skittered ahead and found something familiar to hold onto—the gray lines in the sky . . . rain? She’d forgotten when it had last visited the desert. She thought of the laundry pinned to the clothesline, dry and crisp, ready to be folded. But the longing for rain surpassed this; she yearned for a whiff of moisture in the air. The fantasy of it, not the reality, inspired her to move.

She rolled off the two-seater and onto the floor. Cool, chipped tiles revived her with chilled brevity and she inhaled deeply . . . and smelled dust. The dust was always there; it came with the land, sneaking indoors at every opportunity, desperate for a cool respite from the heat and wind. She pushed off the floor and stood, feeling a dizzy spell roll through her head. A thin layer of dust covered the straps and soles of her slip-on shoes. She’d rinsed them off this morning, but the dust had found the coolness and latched on possessively. The front door’s brassy knob felt warm in her cool palm, and as she twisted, she felt the coolness leave her hand, sucked dry by the thirsty heat. She sighed then shouldered the door. It did not open. This simple act—the opening and closing of a door—was becoming more and more difficult, worsening with the dryness that had become the land, affecting the things on it. Neither of the casita’s doors fit as they should in their now-splintered frames. She stepped back and looked at the door, wedged in its frame, painfully akilter. The small casita was sinking; she felt it, always—the slanting of the cracking tiles as she walked across them and how her body attempted to adjust, leveling and recalibrating her movements and positions. The sinking and slanting were too great for the little apartment, and every day it gave in a little more to the ages-long dry spell that had full reign over the land. The walls moaned and the wood snapped and the concrete cracked. The defeated casita wept, knowing the sand-trap foundations would take it and swallow it whole, dragging it further down into the rotted, dust-ridden caverns of the desert’s bowels.

She drank some water before trying the door again, wetting her lips. The air wicked the moisture away, taking it for itself. She set the bottle down and shoved harder this time—and the door flew open. Little whirlwinds of dust immediately invited themselves in, hurriedly crossing the threshold while the door wheezed on its defeated hinges. Stifling heat swallowed her cool body and breath as she stepped into it, willingly. The strange new light was even stranger outside, without a dusty pane of glass separating her from it. The light greeted her with a warm hug all its own, safe and nourishing. She stood easily, feeling it wrapping around her body, and she relished its kind warmth, a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature or pressure at all.

Her fantasy came to mind—the rain. She smelled the air deeply, searching for a hint, but it was not there. Stale dust. No rain. Its severe, prolonged absence revived the expanding pit in her gut, one separate from the feeling of insignificance—a hollowness, a black-hole hollowness that felt never-ending. She had assumed as fools do, believing in the impossible rather than accepting the truth. Rain will not be coming—look around. Look anywhere. Where would it come from? The sky? And where does the sky get its supply? A water cycle, a re-cycling; no fresh, new water is ever made. It hit her then, why the desert’s tears were so salty and dry, why she had overridden the facts with her meaningless memorizations of true moisture. The rain was acidic, wasn’t it? Salty and corrosive. And this—the acid—was what she had mistaken for rain, their Life source. So what did it matter, if it rained or not? The water was not healthy; it was too out of balance. She remembered faintly now, the taste of it in the flash-flood downpours—how rain usually visited, when and if it came. Huge splatterings of salt. And when it was over and the crusted-mud gutters had resumed their routine dryness the very next day, what had the rain actually done? Made things worse—yes, that’s what it had done. Made things worse. She remembered now; after the rain, the leaves on the trees became pock-marked with disease, and the grainy soil was sharper, with more grit that made their edges bite. And the bugs—she shuddered, remembering how they would hatch, crawl, and fly from the puddles, monsters that bit and gnawed with their tiny sets of poisonous teeth. No, the rain took more than it gave. She had her proof. But what had been given to the rain? What had they, the desert’s people, given to it? Trash, run-off, shit, piss, dirty diapers—anything indigestible to the water, air, and land. Litter hung out in ugly piles, loitering along algae-ridden banks, and the receding shores became breeding grounds for fresh colonies of bugs, emerging from the stagnant water, ever stronger than their parents. To her, it was clear—the rain gave what it had been given, and she couldn’t believe her ignorance, how stupid she had been to accept another human’s word, when all she had to do was think it through for herself.

Laughter suddenly exploded from her dry lips. Believing in rain and hoping for it. It dawned on her beautifully and suddenly, like the strange new light. She finally understood the words for what they were, as she had just done with the rain. They were empty. Empty words, bandied about with no comprehension whatsoever. But they were full of something, she admitted; their fullness depended on blind, gullible, lazy senses. No cognition, no thinking-learning-applying. Believing and hoping were acts of ignorance—becoming aware of what was factual, then hiding from it. They promoted a delusion—encouraging laziness, cultivating confusion—and when the delusion failed to deliver as promised, emotions would take over, a slew of them. She laughed harder now, thinking through the belief in the unknown. To believe in something unknown . . . it didn’t work out, did it? If it was unknown, why would you entrust your belief in it? Why would you give it anything at all—your thought, effort, willingness to believe—if you knew absolutely nothing about it? Generations past had given in, giving blindly of themselves, as they still did today. And, to her, it seemed those people wanted to die in ignorance. They didn’t want to think or learn, acquire knowledge and evolve their intelligence. She saw what they’d chosen—the hopes and beliefs and faiths that had nothing backing them, no solid foundation to stand on, no proof, no evidence, no truth at all. Thoughtless. Senseless. Far from knowledge, they were used in campaigns that discouraged it, and these were in abundance, all across the world. Every group had them, every clustering of people, whatever name they went by. They—the people—had created them, and they put their energies into believing and hoping rather than knowing. But why, why do this…she had no need to ask, because she knew.

She paused and looked around at the barren land they all had a stake in; a hell created in heaven. It hadn’t always been this way, this dry. It was a heaven, once, she thought. And she thought about all the lands here, on this planet, all the hells in heaven. It seemed that no one was truthfully interested in heaven. All their effort was devoted to the making of hells; in-the-name-of warpaths, the holier-than-thou and self-righteous causes—every last one of them did more damage than actual beneficial good, much like the filth-ridden rain spitting back what had been spat at it. She saw where the ‘-isms’ came from, in this rich moment of clarity. The determined separation that was taught, stemming from hateful roots. It was mean. Of course there would be differences, and similarities, that was the point. Life. Everything, everywhere, in every form was individually itself. She wondered why a fact so simple could not be accepted. That was how stupid they all were; they insisted on fighting over a non-issue.

Her teeth were grinding, she felt the kernels of sand that...