Jake had always thought his life was a joke. The kind of joke no one tells because it isn't funny, yet the world insists on repeating it just to see if someone laughs.
At twenty-seven, he didn't have a stable job, was buried up to his neck in debt with three different credit cards—not counting the student loan he never finished paying because he never finished his degree—and he owed his landlord money that had already gone from "friendly reminder" to "if you don't pay, I'll kick you out, you lazy piece of shit."
His family had written him off years ago.
Not in a dramatic way—there wasn't a screaming match or a final door slam—but it was sudden, because they simply stopped calling him.
In short, they stopped asking about him and stopped pretending they cared.And Jake, true to his nature, stopped trying too.
In the end, the only thing he had left was an online friend.A guy he only knew by his username and had talked to almost every day for years.
Video games, memes, complaints about life, conversations about nothing, etc.
Until one day, without explanation, without a goodbye, without a final message, the user appeared as "offline" and never logged in again.
But none of that mattered now. Jake stood on the rooftop of his apartment complex, a six-story shithole building in a shithole neighborhood, with his toes hanging over the edge of the void.
The night wind hit his face with a coldness that should have made him feel something, anything, but he felt nothing.
Just emptiness.
Well, at least the view is nice, he thought, looking at the city lights stretching to the horizon. It's funny, I never came up here in four years of living in this shithole building. I should've done it sooner… minus the jumping part, of course.
Jake took a deep breath.
He closed his eyes.
His hands were shaking, but not from the cold.
Just one step. One step and it's over. No more debt. No more collection calls. No more waking up wondering what the point of getting up is.
His legs tensed.
His body leaned forward.
And then…
I can't.
The realization hit him like a bucket of ice water.
His muscles froze and his body jerked backward on instinct, as if an invisible hand had yanked him by the shirt.
I can't do it… I'm a coward, he thought, and a bitter laugh slipped from his mouth. I can't live properly and I can't even die properly.
Tears blurred his vision as he stepped back from the edge. He wanted to live. It was stupid and irrational and he had no logical reason to want to keep going in this shithole world, but he wanted to live.
To hell with everything. I'm getting down from here, I'm crawling into bed, and tomorrow I'll look for another shitty job like always.
With his hands still trembling, Jake grabbed the safety railing to climb over it and return to the safe side of the rooftop.
He lifted one leg.
And his foot caught.
"¿What…?"
He looked down.
The laces of his right sneaker were untied.The lace had snagged on the base of the railing.
Jake felt his balance collapse.
"No, no, no, no, NO—"
His body twisted, his hands slipped off the wet metal, and gravity, that relentless bitch, did the rest.
The world flipped, and the wind that moments ago had been brushing his face now roared in his ears as he fell.
Seriously? SERIOUSLY? I decide not to die and I trip over my own fucking laces? Is this my grand finale? Not a dramatic decision, not an act of courage, but a STUMBLE?
God, if you exist, I want you to know you're a shitty comedian.
And then, silence.
There was no pain.
There was no impact.
Just a sudden, total, absolute darkness that swallowed him as if he had never existed.
...
...
...
The darkness was complete.
There was no up or down, there was no cold or heat, it was just nothing except Jake's consciousness floating in a void that stretched in every direction.
Well, I guess this is what being dead is like… fuck.
Jake tried to move, but he had no body.He tried to speak, but he had no mouth.He simply existed as a thought suspended in nothingness.
Not bad, honestly… at least there are no debt collectors here.
The silence stretched for what could have been seconds or centuries; Jake had no way of knowing.
And then, a voice echoed.
"Another suicide? Ugh, they're such a pain."
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere at the same time.It was as if the very concept of "voice" had decided to exist without bothering to choose specific characteristics.
"Hey, wait a minute," Jake protested, or at least thought the protest, because the words simply appeared in the void. "I didn't kill myself."
"You jumped from the rooftop of a six-story building."
"I tripped! That's completely different!"
"You tripped… on the rooftop of a building… right at the edge… after going up there with the intention of jumping."
"But I didn't jump! I decided not to do it! I changed my mind!"
"And yet, you're dead."
"Because of an accident! My laces were untied! That's not suicide!"
A silence followed that declaration, and Jake could almost swear the entity was processing the stupidity of what he had just said.
"Are you blaming your shoes for your death?"
"I'm blaming PHYSICS. Gravity specifically. And the wet railing. And yes, my shoes too. Basically I'm blaming everything except myself."
"Because you had nothing to do with climbing onto a rooftop at two in the morning."
"I went up for fresh air."
"At the edge."
"I like adrenaline."
"With the intention of jumping."
"That's a very malicious interpretation of the facts."
Another silence, this time longer.
"You're aware that I can see your entire record, right? Every thought, every intention, every moment of your life."
"…Then you also know that I regretted it."
"Yes… I know that."
Jake felt something akin to relief.
"But that changes nothing."
"What do you mean it changes nothing?"
"Jake, the way you died is irrelevant. Whether it was suicide, an accident, or if a piano had fallen on your head, the result is the same."
"And what's the result?"
"You're going to hell."
The silence that followed was the heaviest Jake had ever experienced in his entire existence, life and death included.
"…To hell?"
"To hell," the voice confirmed, in the same tone someone would use to announce that the bus arrives in five minutes.
"Why?"
"Because the amount of negative karma you accumulated in life is, being generous, considerable."
"I never killed anyone! I never stole! I never did anything terrible!"
"Karma doesn't work like that… it's not just about what you did, but also about what you failed to do. The wasted opportunities, the ignored potential, the people you could have helped and didn't, the times you chose inaction when action was necessary."
"That's unfair!"
"Life is not obligated to be fair, Jake. It is only obligated to function."
Jake wanted to scream, protest, argue, but the words got stuck in his nonexistent throat.
"But wait," he finally managed to say, "isn't there some kind of appeal? A process? Something I can do to—?"
"Your case already belongs to another jurisdiction."
"What jurisdiction? What are you talking about? Who's in charge of—?"
"Goodbye, Jake… and a piece of advice: don't waste your time looking for someone to blame down there. The laces were not responsible for your life."
"Wait! You can't just—!"
But the voice was already gone.
And with it, the darkness began to fracture like a shattered mirror, the pieces falling into an even deeper void.
Jake felt his consciousness crumble, like sand slipping through fingers he no longer had.
This can't be happening. This can't—
And then, everything went dark again.
...
...
...
"Hmmmmmmp..."
A hoarse, dry groan was the first thing that came out of his mouth when his consciousness returned.
What a fucking weird dream, was his first coherent thought, wrapped in a mental fog so thick he could barely string two ideas together.
"Agggg… everything hurts," he growled, trying to bring a hand to his head.
And then he saw it.
His hand—or rather, what was left of it.
There was no skin, no flesh, no muscle.
Just bone.
"WHAT THE FUCK?"
He shot upright as panic exploded in his chest. He brought both hands to his face on pure reflex, and what he felt beneath his skeletal fingers was not skin or flesh.
It was bone too.
"NO, NO, NO, NO, NO…"
Panic overwhelmed him. Jake frantically patted his body with his skeletal hands to confirm whether he was now completely a skeleton.
And then his hands moved down.
They moved over his neck and found skin.
They moved over his chest and found a normal torso.
They moved over his abdomen, normal. Over his legs, normal.
Only his hands and his face were bone.
The rest was completely human.
But before he could feel relief, before he could process that information, Jake's brain focused on a single priority.
THE priority.
With an urgency that surpassed any existential crisis, his bony hands dropped to his crotch.
Jake checked to confirm that his little buddy was still there.
"Oh, thank God," Jake exhaled, dropping onto his back against the dry, cracked ground. "I still have it… everything else I don't care about, but THIS had to stay."
He lay there for a moment, breathing heavily, staring up at… up?
There was no sky, sun or clouds.
Only a dark reddish void stretching above him like an endless ceiling.