Excerpt: A Quick Bite

I always knew I would die young.

It wasn’t with the same sort of certainty as you know the Earth is round, or that one plus one equals two; this was something less tangible, less definable. It was like a coiled spring, a crouching cat, waiting to be unleashed. It was the feeling of destiny about to be fulfilled.

When I laughed at one of my mother’s ‘senior’ moments, she would make a theatrical comment about how I would be exactly the same when I was her age; but what I didn’t tell her was that I knew I would never celebrate my fiftieth birthday. When my best friend joked about how we would one day live in neighbouring rooms in a retirement home, I couldn’t tell her such a comforting fantasy would never come true – especially since I couldn’t even begin to explain it to myself.

But what I didn’t know, what there was no way I could have ever foreseen, was that for me, death would not be the end.

In fact, as it turned out, my death was only the beginning.