Hallway

The corridor we'd walked down was long - endlessly long, or so it seemed, and Danny and I walked along shooting the shit about the old days. It felt great, talking to Danny. It seemed like it had been a lifetime since we'd been able to do this, just hang out and talk - I'd been so busy with my day to day stuff and it had just gotten overwhelming, to the point where I felt like my head was going to explode all the time. I honestly couldn't remember the last time I'd talked to Danny at all.

And wasn't that strange? I mean, he was my brother and I couldn't dredge up a single recent memory of talking to him - not at Mom and Dad's place, not at the coffee shop we used to hit every morning, not even on the phone.

Finally I stopped and turned to him and asked,

"Danny, when's the last time we talked to each other?"

He looked at me and he got that little smile on his face, like he always used to get right before he told me a big secret. And hadn't he had plenty of those growing up?

"Don't you remember? It was on the phone, the night before I died."

Shit yeah, that was right. I remembered it then - he was in the hospital and everyone thought he was getting better and would hold out at least another week, and I was out on the coast trying to get a flight back. How could I have forgotten that? Weird.

We turned and continued on down the hallway. Finally I asked him,

"Danny, why can't I remember that?"

He grinned, "I'm pretty sure that right now, you probably can't remember much of anything!"

He was right. I had this strange sensation that there were things I should be able to dredge up, but I had this weird unfocused feeling. I remember one time a friend gave me a bag of chocolate covered espresso beans and I ate the whole damn bag, not thinking about the fact that I'd just downed the equivalent of about fifteen shots. My nerves felt like they were going to pop loose in my muscles, and my head went into this state where I couldn't hold a single coherent thought for more than a second. This was kind of like that, only I couldn't even think of what it was that I couldn't remember.

As I tried to figure it out, the hallway ended. We stood on a landing in front of a stairway; one flight led up and one down. There must be a skylight or something above, because the stairs grew lighter as they went up and the stairs downward descended into darkness that didn't seem to be cut by the lights on the walls.

I looked at Danny.

"Okay, I give. What's going on?"

He looked back at me and his grin faded a bit.

"Haven't you guessed? You probably don't remember your heart problems and all those little attacks you had - well, let's just say the last one finished the job."

"You're dead, buddy!" And then he laughed.