It started as a typical Saturday. The sun rose and the room where he lay in inherited a yellowish orange hue. As he sat up, the natural light on his pale skin gave him the completion of a circus peanut. He looked as if he hadn’t left his apartment in days, his hair matted from the pillow and his fun-run t-shirt wrinkled and stained. He had awoken several minutes early, so he turned the alarm off his phone sparing himself from hearing the God-awful tune he heard every morning. He was about to fix his hair when he decided it was dark enough that he didn’t care if it looked wretched; nobody could tell if he was running.
He pulled on his tight black Under Armor long-sleeved shirt and a pair of yellow Live Strong shorts before tying on his running shoes. In minutes he was running on the city sidewalk at an abnormally fast pace. He zoomed past block after block, counting how many Chicago Sun Times boxes he saw to entertain himself on his run.
He began to see his name on the headlines of the papers, “Mark Beddingway,” was all they ever said. Not knowing why his name appeared, he pushed it out of his mind, telling himself he was hallucinating from dehydration. Shutting his eyes to calm down for just a moment, he hoped that he wouldn’t run into anything.
Eyes open, the world was a different place. The people were not people anymore: they were frames of people. Ghosts with a transparency he could not describe and piercing black eyes. Every bakery, every restaurant he ran past did not smell of food but of smoke rolling off a dragon’s tongue. The pale blue sky had transformed to a sinister red and clouds of blood hung above him. Everywhere he looked, everyday objects morphed into the objects of Mark’s nightmares. Spiders crawled on the walls of buildings and passing cars spat boiling motor oil, staining the Chicago skyline.
For the first time ever on a run, he stopped. He turned to the friendliest looking human figure he could find. “What is happening?” he asked in a panicked voice.
“What?” the man said. Without waiting for an answer the man walked away. The rate of Mark’s breathing increased; his heart felt as if it were going to tear itself out of his chest and take off just as he had wanted to in this moment.
He began to run, hoping that motion would clear his mind. As he ran, his muscles began to spasm and quiver. The sidewalk in front of him tore itself apart. The cracks glowed and he could see the pits of Hell beneath his feet. He was tempted to let himself slip in and fall to his demise that seemed to be very near to him. The air he breathed felt like hot tar; it barely entered his lungs and lingered once it got there.
The idea that someone was following him soon entered his mind. Never looking forward, only behind his shoulder, plowing down anything in front of him. Finally, he completed his loop. He ran up the stairs to his apartment, but the steps never seemed to end. As soon as he made the climb up one flight of stairs, another appeared in front of him. He kept running, taking the stairs two at a time, and after what seemed like fifty flights, he reached his apartment door.
The day had turned to night and his apartment returned to its true pale blue. Everything yellow and orange was gone and his floors looked as if they were covered in a shimmering blanket of snow. He could see the air he breathed outwards and his teeth chattered, gnawing on his skin which had turned to black ice. He fell to his bed in a heap of frozen flesh and cuddled everything comforting that he could find. He froze to death, only to rise again the next day and repeat his daily routine after swearing off his medication.