“On the day it happened, I was drifting through the wrong side of town,” Chucky absently clawed at the frayed bandages encircling his wrists. “I was a little drunk and nursing a wound from a girl who politely gutted me with: ‘let’s just be friends’. I stumbled down some alley, it smelled like piss and rot. A homeless man was passed out on this filthy, stained mattress, a needle sticking out of his arm like a forgotten surrender. He might have even been dead. It was hard to tell.”

I half hoped, something feral would detach from the shadows then and get me. Slit my throat for the crumbled five-dollar bill and half a pack of Marlboros in my pocket. I fantasized about that girl’s reaction over seeing my demise announced on the evening news. The lights from the TV flickering across her face in the dark, lighting up her anguish and regrets in neon. But no matter how deep I dove into my make-believe, I couldn’t conjure a single tear from her. It didn’t matter anyway, for it was only me and the half-dead stranger, and he certainly wasn’t up to the task of executioner.

And then I saw it. The message scrawled above him on the crumbling brick, in defiant spray-painted scrawl. A prophecy meant to slice open my belly and dump my entrails onto the pissed soaked ground: ‘Our salvation lies solely with those brave enough to stay present.’

That was my sign to bow out, Francis. You see, I will not contribute to the world’s unraveling, but nor will I lift a finger to save it. For I am not really here. I am always drifting in the ether, and I can’t get out, nor do I want to get out. But my body is still taking up precious space. Better to let the void reclaim me in exchange for something, anything, with purpose. I’d only get in the hero’s way.

They say that only the good die young, but the villains die too, and the not-quite-villains, and the unremarkable souls like me, drifting in the gray. Death’s the ultimate equalizer, blind to virtue or vice or your mediocracy. I know this intimately, Francis, because I died, and I am nothing. Unfortunately for me, those damn paramedics are about as undiscriminating as death. They clamped those cold paddles to my chest, filled my heart full of electricity until it jolted awake—a ragged, wet thump that howled through my veins like a profane rebirth, screaming: “Fuuuuck.”

And just like that, I had no say in the matter. Dragged back, kicking and cursing, into the world of the living. And then I met you, Francis. But you’re not really here either, are you?”