The Boy Who Wasn't Afraid to Die

He grinned at the sun, the strange boy who wasn't afraid to die, and he giggled great big frothy bubbles.

Stick a straw in a glass of red milk and blow hard into it, again and again, until crimson foam surges above the rim like surf and murder in a stormy cove.

That's pretty much what his mouth looked like as he lay there in the street, giggling out the evidence of hemorrhage.

And Sara Templeton, the girl who should have been my bride but who was only weeks away from leaving me for a riverboat gambler named Quinton Rodriguez III, tore her gaze from the dying boy and buried her face in my chest. Unaware, as of yet, that she wouldn't always love me I held her and tenderly stroked her hair and pretended not to mind as she snuffled grief and mucus all over the front of my favorite shirt.

A crowd assembled, like crowds do, and everyone decided they had important things to say. They stared at the dying boy and started screaming things like:
"My god, we must do something!" And, "How did it happen?! Who saw?!" And, "What's that thing we're supposed to try?!" And, "Heimlich maneuver?" And, "No you fool, that's for choking!"

One guy in a dirty baseball cap claimed he knew how to make a defibrillator out of a cell phone battery and the wire rims from brassiere. And nine women were topless and several people were without their phones before someone noticed that the guy had his hand down his pants and wasn't really focusing all that much on the construction of a makeshift defibrillator.

And through it all, the boy continued to die and his giggles didn't subside.

And I asked the boy why he wasn't afraid. And he writhed and he bled and his lips turned pale, and he replied with his eyes that his love had left him for another and so how could anything frighten him now.

And then the boy grinned and died and I told Sara not to look. And I held her with both arms and thanked every god I could remember that she was by my side.

But then, of course, several weeks later she left me for a riverboat gambler named Quinton Rodriguez III. And after that, the things that should have horrified began not to bother me much at all.

***

(Dark Agony. Despair and Stuff. A Shambling, Lurching Sorrow That Just Keeps Getting Worse and Never, Ever Recedes...

What are those "tag" things that good weblog writers put on the bottom of their posts so that the Internet knows what kind of story it is?

And is: "A Shambling, Lurching Sorrow That Just Keeps Getting Worse and Never, Ever Recedes" actually a category? 'Cause if it isn’t it should be.)