Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

morning, she imagined them as similar to the shape of a lima bean, with tiny, round bottoms that fit puzzle-piece-like into curving gray matter. Her speech was often slurred, but the gift of brain metastases was that oftentimes she could not hear her own voice. Memory was an issue, though maybe not. She could be paranoid. That was a common side effect of the myriad medications she ingested.
    Short-term-memory loss. Palsy. Dry mouth. Leaky bowels. Her breathing was borderline suffocation, the shallow gulps bringing wheezing death rattles from her chest. She could no longer sit up unaided. Her skin was cold, the constant temperature of a refrigerator’s vegetable crisper, and, in keeping with the metaphor, its texture, once smooth and even, was now entirely wilted.
    In the early days of her diagnosis, she’d had many questions about her impending death but could find no one to answer them. There were plenty of tracts in the doctor’s office on keeping a good attitude, eating macrobiotic diets, and making your way back to Jesus, but June could find nothing that spoke frankly of the actual act of death itself. There must have been information online, but if June wanted to read endless paragraphs of poor-me navel-gazing, she could walk down to the reading lab and start grading creative-writing assignments. Besides, she could not overcome her long-held belief that the internet was designed to render human beings functionally retarded.
    Years ago, when June had had gallbladder surgery, she had talked to other patients to find out what to expect. How long was the recovery? Was it worth it? Did it take care of the problem?
    There was no one to talk with this time. You could not ask someone, What was it like when you died?
    “It’s different for everyone,” a nurse had said, and June, still enough life to feel the injustice of her situation, said, “That’s bullshit.”
    Bullshit,
she had said.
Bullshit,
to a perfect stranger.
    Five years ago, the air conditioner at the house had finally given up the ghost, and the repairman, a former student of June’s who seemed disproportionately fascinated with the minutiae of his job, had described in great detail where the fatal flaw had occurred. Condensation had rusted the coil. The Freon had leaked, depriving the system of coolant. The hose to the outside unit had frozen. Inside the house, the temperature had continued to rise rather than fall, the poor thermostat not understanding why cooling was not being accomplished. Meanwhile, the fan had continued on, whirring and whirring until the motor burned out.
    Cause and effect.
    And yet, while June could easily find a semiliterate HVAC repairman to explain to her the process by which her air conditioner had died on the hottest day of the summer, there was no medical expert who could reveal to June the minutiae of death.
    Finally, on one of the last days that she was able to leave the house unaided, June had discovered a book in the dusty back shelves of a used-book store. She had almost overlooked it, thinking that she had found some New Age tripe written by a pajama-clad cultist. The cover was white with the outline of a triangle inside a solid circle. The title was an idiotic wordplay she could have done without —
How Do You Die?
— but she found comfort inside the pages, which was more than any living being had offered her.
    The following text will serve as a guide to the physical act of dying,
Dr. Ezekiel Bonner wrote.
Though every human being is different, the body dies in only one way.
    “Well,” June had mumbled to herself. There, finally, was the truth.
    None of us are special. None of us are unique. We may think we are individuals, but in the end, we are really nothing at all.
    June had taken the book home, prepared a pot of tea, and read with a pen in her hand so that she could make notations in the margins. At points, she had laughed aloud at the descriptions offered by Dr. Bonner, because the physical act of the body shutting down was not unlike that of her dying air conditioner. No oxygen, no blood flow, the heart burning out. The brain was the last to go, which pleased June until she realized that there would be a period in which her body was dead but her brain was still alive. She would be conscious, able to understand what was going on around her, yet unable to do or say anything about it.
    This gave her night terrors like she’d never had before. Not believing in the afterlife was finally getting its own