[KoAII][Round Two]Krillin VS. Zangya

[Kazuya]

Krillin

The room was silence. Not merely quiet, but pure, extracted silence that filled every sharp, sterile corner, and muted her breathing. Clean breathing. O2 in, CO2 out. The doctor shut the door behind him and walked to the opposite end of the room, shattering the room with thin sheets of transparency that carried a representation of her lungs. After he placed six sheets in a particular order, he turned and looked through her eyes into the wall behind her.

“It isn’t good.”

Her heart fluttered.

“You have lung cancer, and it is advanced. The cancer has metastasized.”

She smoothed her flaxen hair into her neck. “Cancer. How long?”

“One week.”

Her eyes swept across the uneven stucco above her, allowing the news to sink in with relish. “One week,” she repeated, with a chuckle.

The doctor was fifty-four, and had sentenced far too many people to be surprised at her reaction. He gave her the important information, told her who to call, how to make the arrangements, and the other mechanics following such a diagnosis. His tongue rattled while his mind locked-on the turkey chili his wife had promised him for tonight. Only two more hours.

She was thirty-one, a smoker of eleven long years before quitting four months ago after she noticed the yellowing of her teeth. She was not married, and never had been, but had aborted two babies before her third trimester, so her figure was, to say the least, flawless. She had matured into a gorgeous, if somewhat flawed, woman who still had a decade left of beauty before age took its toll. As the doctor explained the general necessities, her mind locked upon the tongue depressors lodged haphazardly in the basin a few feet away. A splinter would be delightful right about now, perhaps in her pupil, or nipple. It really didn’t matter. She was filled with a sense of finality, and nothing would please her more than a heaping helping of pain.

She had been on the very edge for years, through bulimia in high school, through the sex in college, through the tramps and romps of her later 20’s, and the cigarettes all along. She had wanted to finish it all for some time, as a final fuck-you to the great big Nobody that identified her as something slightly less than human, but could never work up the gumption.

But finally, a reason. Only a week to live. She had long known, of course, that she would die eventually. Everyone does. But she had always planned to make it with great purpose. Her final act, a willing embrace of the victory that is death.

In her madness, she constructed plans of how she would do it. Currently, she had twenty-seven catalogued plans with the passion of an engineer fresh out of graduate school. It would be her twenty-eighth that would bring it all about.

She opened the door, and, immediately, removed her brassiere. She wouldn’t be needing that anymore. Next came her glasses, crunched underfoot. Her keys were thrown against the wall and into a potted plant. The potted plant was overturned. It was a symphonic mess of freedom. Her kitchen, which had previously been kept meticulous, had gained years of neglect in a few short acts.

From the closet, her contraption. It was brilliant, really. A simple device, fitted to her oven, that would simultaneously turn the oven on 450 degrees (the temperature for lasagna, her favorite meal), allow the door to shut, and lock it firmly in place. Her heart was strong, but the rest of her wasn’t. She wasn’t a doctor. Cancer was weakening her cells and blood, why not her spirit?

No note, no pen, no scribble, no carving. She opened the door.

She crawled in.

She flipped the switch.

One minute later, she was screaming loud enough to alert the neighbors, who would be far too late to save her, let alone the house.

Two minutes later, she was medically dead.

Those who knew her best would say, however, that she had been stillborn. Dead from birth. Mutilated by some horror in a past life, perhaps, or a chemical imbalance in the brain. She was misunderstood, a quiet person, with a somewhat scary twinkle in her eye from now and then.

The oven was merely a meaningless baptism. Only the living can die, and she did not qualify.