Tick Tock, Time To Die

Watching the Felix-looking black cat with its eyes shooting side-to-side like a paranoid drug addict with its tail swinging like Death’s scythe with the same motion as the eyes followed by a smile that continues to laugh at me while I sit at the kitchen table with my face in my hands, staring at the time through my fingers as the headache drilled deeper inside my head while the rhythm of the tick-tock ticking second hand on the smiling cat’s body sounded like time was saying,    

“JUST. DIE. JUST. DIE. JUST. DIE.”.  

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I reach across the table for the bottle of pain pills and it opens with ease like opening a coffin, I take two and went straight to bed.  

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Waiting to catch some Z's, I catch myself staring at the black ceiling fan above me, watching it slowly move in circles like a small flock of vultures circling me, waiting for me to die.  

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After a while, the pain pills finally kick in, almost asleep when out of the blue, I notice the tick-tock ticking somehow found its way upstairs into my bedroom, filling my room with nothing but that sound.

Oddly, the Water Torture Cell magic trick popped into my head, where the magician hangs upside down in a straitjacket and the box fills with water and he/she has a limited time to escape. Two stories by Edgar Allan Poe followed like a domino effect; The Black Cat and The Tell Tale Heart. I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of my life turning into two Edgar Allan Poe stories plus a suicidal magic trick with a twist. Though, it’s funny how the things we hate make us think up the craziest things.    

I didn’t laugh long, for the headache came back, stronger and more painful as the tick-tock ticking started to drown me in my bedroom.  

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I went back downstairs to the kitchen and grabbed the bottle of pills off the table and popped two more pills and took down the smiling cat clock, smashing it to pieces and laughed. I always hated that thing, but after my wife died holding it, I felt it was only right to keep it.  

Walked outside to the garage to grab my earphones from the car and when I came back inside through the kitchen, I stopped dead in my tracks to only find my lifeless body laid across the kitchen table with the pill bottle in my death grip and pain pills scattered like lost souls.  

Frozen in terror, I forced myself to look up and there it was, the smiling cat clock, looking like I never smashed it while it stared dead at me, with its unmoving eyes and a smile that laughed at me as I laid dead in front of it.