"Excuse me, did you say something?" His skin is dark. I recognize him. An African-American Hollywood actor. His name, I can't recall.

"No," I answer, both because I hadn't said something and because it's what I meant to say.

Trench coat. Shades. He looks like he wants to be a hero. No, wait. He looks like he wants to bite my neck.

I scoff.

"Don't do it," he says.

Don't scoff?

And then he whispers words I'm not certain if I heard, "You can wake up now!"

But I walk outside. I don't want to. At least the sun is gone, right? Maybe I should fix that. I slip a hand into my pocket, and grip the vortex in my hand. Wrong pocket. That's the courage. My courage. Is that why I won't wake up, because my courage is in my pocket?

"Don't do it!" he whispers after me in what may have been a yell.

Out of my pocket. I shouldn't have. It's not the sun. Yet I put it where the sun was. Ooops? It's my courage; a big black hole.

Well, they said the world was ending, didn't they?

"No, it must not be so!" he yells. Cheeky bastard can read my thoughts, eh?

I let go of it.

"Too late," he pronounces. "Can't wake up now, Hunter. Not anymore."

We wait.

We fear.

We wait.

I like being patient.

I hear it now; a flushing noise. We follow Mars toward it. I can hear the martians screaming incoherently, even if they don't exist. It sucks us in like the galaxy is defecating, and we're the unwanted bodily waste. The world is crap. I always thought so.

But who pushed the lever on this black hole of a toilet? Was it me, when I put it into the sky?

Crackling static is all I see. So that's what's in a black hole. Nothingness. Life is a television channel. But now it's airing no station. No Dorothy, foreshadowing how we all go. Young. Innocent. No newsman, in whacked out lunacy, as prophet of the apocalypse. No Wesley Snipes, in blacked out tench coat and sunglasses, as a vampiricly snobby cashier.

No me. I, too, cease to exist. And then, I cease to cease. Am I deceased?

I wake up, though my eyes remain shut.

"Don't thrash around, you're just dreaming," a woman says to me.

I'm strapped down, I can feel it. Opening eyes now. In a white patient's robe. White. How dare they? I'm on a hospital bed, bound tightly.

"Don't worry dear, everything will be alright," she lies.

I recognize her. Nurse Mildred Ratched. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. A book I didn't read. A movie I thoroughly enjoyed.

How sinister. Where are Dorothy's needles? I must still be dreaming.

"No," she tells me. Can she read my mind too?

What next, a cup of pills?

"You're not dreaming anymore." Voice cold. Face stern. "This is your reality, now that you are dead."

I didn't want to believe her. I like being patient, I tell myself again. And surely, I can't be her only patient.

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