reading room
When's the Last Time?
"When's the last time you sat and thought about your own mortality for a whole minute?"
You flipped the question like a coin and watched me wait for it to land.
So I did.
One minute. Long enough for tea to cool. Short enough for a heart to stop.
At first— a box. Not wood. Not stone. Just absence, shaped by my mother's voice cracking.
Then the seconds began to drop. Sixty. Each a leaf spiralling down.
0:10 my dog, still warm in the earth
0:23 the bruise I swore was nothing.
0:37 the fast of fear— metal and milk.
0:42 bargaining into nothing.
0:49 clocks grow wings. hover above me, ticking like insects. one lands. counts down. evaporates.
0:57 I remembered something my grandmother once said— that the soul lingers, just for a moment, to see if it mattered.
Maybe this was that moment. Or its rehearsal.
1:00 I didn't cry. Not until later, when I looked up and saw the world still scrolling, laughing, not counting at all.
I had just spent a whole minute dying, and no one noticed.
3:14 the timer glitched. or I did. I stood. the chair still held my outline.
— Lilith