Haven

I'll tell you this story before I go to bed. I'm dead tired. Hear that enthusiasm in my voice? There isn't any. You're just crazy.

I keep waking up in the morning and it bothers me. I don't want to wake up every once in awhile. My life isn't eventful enough for me to care about being awake all the time, having to go places every day to live. Being dead must be so easy. The only hard part is getting there.

This morning was no exception and I woke up just like every other morning. But of course, you know that SOMETHING interesting happened that day, because this would make for a terrible story if I told you what a regular day in my life was like.

I hate it when they do what I'm about to do in stories, when they introduce what's going to happen in a boring way. I'm just bad at telling stories. But that doesn't matter, because today was pretty awesome and would make a good story no matter how I tell it.

I was going to the beach today with some friends.

Now for some character development: I enjoy being early for reasons I could bore you with but won't. I set my alarm for three hours before I was supposed to get up because the "SNOOZE" button is a wonderful invention. I got out of bed in the least graceful way possible, threw on some clothes in my tired stupor, tried to make my teeth less green, whatever whatever.

They say that the beginning of stories are terrible. They're right. I'm going to cut to the chase.

I got in my car because I was going to the beach. I wanted to meet my friends there so we could drink alcohol underage and admire bikinis. That's called being a man. I drove and drove and drove until I reached the beach.

Clocks everywhere were approaching noon and fast. At the same time, I lay my towel down on the beach. I sat down, admiring my manliness in stupid sunglasses.

"Help! Help!!"

Suddenly my cynicism went away (but don't worry, it comes back) and I looked at the water while the cries for help continued in the distance. My heart started pumping three times faster and I instinctually ran out towards the water.

It was odd. Nobody else seemed to see him.

But that didn't matter at the moment because I was swimming hard out through the waves, going to go save a life. Like I said before, the hard part is becoming dead. Once you're there it's easy. I bet most people forget how hard it was.

My head ducked in and out of the water as I gasped for air, breathing in salty air and salty water in equal proportions. My man-muscles that I always had for women paid off now, as I sprinted through the water with strokes the size of whales.

I had swum long enough, and I paused for a moment and took my head out of the water. There was the man, still crying for help. I closed my eyes and dug into the water again.

I breathed harder and worked harder and my heart beat faster and faster as I sped through the water as fast as I could. It went on and on like this for what felt like a long time.

I opened my eyes and my heart skipped a beat, I missed a few breaths, I forgot to hear things.

The water was blood red. The man was gone. The sky was black but brightness shone on the sea of blood. The world seemed to have but two colors; red and black. I span frantically, looking for both the man and the beach. I turned left, right, completely around, and completely around, and completely -

There was an island now, on the horizon; a volcano island, constantly spewing red lava down its black surface. And there was nothing else around me. It looked like a tropical paradise that had been converted into an island for Black Sabbath. My pee still showed up in the water from fright.

I didn't want to go through all of those hardships to get to death, so I swam towards the island, figuring drowning is worse than whoever lives on this island.

Imagine going to the beach on a regular day at around noon to meet some friends. Imagine there's a man at the horizon, drowning and yelling for help. You go to save him and swim as fast as you can. You pull your head out of the water to find that you're in the middle of a sea of blood. You find, on the horizon, an evil volcano island. Imagine how you'd feel. That's how I felt.

I swam slowly, because it's hard to swim quickly when I feel that way. I might have been thinking something, but I probably wasn't. Too weirded out.

I arrived on the shore. Everything sounded weirder, too. The waves gave a screeching echo that made me want to scream. I did. Somebody must have heard my scream because a dart went into my neck seconds after I began screaming.

I stopped being awake for awhile.