A theater.
Rows of empty chairs.
On stage, a version of myself.
Not the me I knew.
Fatter. Hungrier. Eyes like punctured cans.
He performed for no one.
He told jokes.
He cried.
He ripped apart props with his teeth.
The audience was silence itself, thick and suffocating.
Behind the curtains, something worse waited.
I had to get there.
I had to know.
Because somewhere behind that curtain was the memory of how I died.
How I truly died.
Not the motel death. Not the floating. Not the sun scream.
The true death.
But before I could move, the pig appeared again.
Now he was huge.
Bigger than the stage.
Bigger than the theater.
He opened his mouth and out came everything I had ever forgotten.
My mother's hand on my hair.
The first girl I kissed under the bleachers.
The taste of blood in my mouth when I lost my first fight.
I was drowning in it.
Sinking.
I opened my eyes, and just like before the humanoid pig in his suit was seriously eating the dinner of cash and coins in his plate, now this time around I was as strange as the first time I had regained all my memories and I know what to do... although I had not be long since I came into this world, I know what to do. I needed to act fast if I was not to die again.