Вера Шайдерова

If I wasn't such a coward, I'd kill myself. Life sucks, then you die. This year I wished I was dead and they all clapped without knowing. Sometimes you're out of the door and halfway to work before you realize that you've totally forgotten to kill yourself. - Suicide is not the answer. - It is sometimes. For example, if someone said "What is it called when you kill yourself?" - What are you writing? - Suicide note. - You misspelled "useless". Anywhere you hang yourself is home. Death is the only certainty in life. Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, death is inevitable. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. It’s true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine. Not long after their exile to the rooftops, the Wisps of Ardisht realized that they would soon run out of matches to light their beloved cigarettes. They kept a chalk-line count on the side of the tallest chimney. Five hundred. The next day three hundred. The next day one hundred/ they rationed them, burned them down to the striker's fingers, trying to light at least thirty cigarettes with each. When they were down to twenty matches, lighting became a ceremony. By ten, the women were crying. Nine. Eight. The clan leader dropped the seventh off the roof by accident, and proceeded to throw his own body after it in shame. Six. Five. It was inevitable. The fourth match was blown out by a breeze - a gross oversight by the new clan leader, who also plunged to his death, although his nosedive was not of his own choosing. Three: we will die without them. Two: it's too painful to go on. And then, in the moment of deepest desperation, a grand idea emerged, devised by a child, no less: simply made sure that there is always someone smoking. Each cigarette can be lit from the previous one. As long as there is a lit cigarette, there is the promise of another. The glowing ash end is the seed of continuity! Schedules were drawn up: dawn duty, morning smoke, lunchtime puffer, midafternoon and late-afternoon assignments, crepuscular puller, lonely midnight sentinel. The sky was always lit with at least one cigarette, the candle of hope. She only said, ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ With tears in mournful throng the newborn babe ‘Tis meet we welcome to a life of woe: But him whom death releases from his toil, With songs of gladness speed upon his way. Die before you die and find that there is no death.