The bottle of Jack, drained of its contents, tumbled over the edge of the bed to join the others. Shaking, the hand that had previously held the cold yet ever-healing cylinder drifted over to cover the face of the form splayed out across the bed. Sweat and urine coated the bare mattress, the sheets torn away and wrapped around the legs of the man from whom the foul substances had come. The room, which someone had branded a studio apartment so they could charge nine hundred dollars a month to let some poor soul file himself away from the world in it, hadn’t had power in weeks; casting the four dilapidated walls in a deepening blue light. Or was it ever that dark? It seemed as though everything had grown darker with every passing day since he lost his legs. He slid his hand down from his forehead and quickly balked at his own odor; even his hand smelled of filth. Perhaps then it was a blessing that no one had come to see him in so long, lest he give them another reason to turn away in disgust.

The man cast his eyes to the dirty grey curtains that shifted and swayed over the yawning maw of a broken window. The thought had crossed his mind many times, a simple dive over the edge could set him free. The pain, the sleepless nights, all gone. One final plunge into oblivion. Any other time, the flowing tide of good ol’ Jack’s respite was enough to get him to sleep and to get the thoughts to leave him be. But raids of the liquor store had grown ever more difficult as his legs had given out, it wasn’t as if he had a family to help him along. Maybe it was time.

The man rose to a sitting position with some effort, feeling the contents of his stomach shift and threaten a messy escape. Not that what would exit would be that different than what had entered, he mused, he had taken little interest in eating for several days. A shaking arm pulled him to the edge of the mattress, a pail stream against the darkness, and sent him tumbling over onto a floor littered with bottles and empty wrappers. The square edge of one bottle was enough to snap a rib in on itself, causing the man to cry out to a world that couldn’t hear him just as he could barely see it. His other hand, shaking even more from the pain, dragged him ever closer to the filthy shrouds hiding his exit.

Whisky bottles slid aside as wrappers crunched under the weight of the man as he slid on shaking hands. Another pull brought him close enough to grab the swaying lengths of the curtains. The rough fabric graded on the inside of his palms, spurring just enough malice from him to twist his stunted body with effort and send the curtains clattering down around him in a spray of drywall. Dry air rushed uninhibited over the naked form that lay below as the man heaved in wheezing breaths. His side had begun to swell where the rib had broken, the pain holding his body rigid enough to lift an arm to the window sill.

Another tremorous pull brought him over the edge, the shattered glass biting into the weak flesh of his palms. It didn’t matter. A thrust of strength, the very last of his, and his upper half was laid across the chipped concrete so many pigeons had sat and looked on as the world crumbled away both inside and out of the tenth story apartment.

Noxious smoke and irradiated dust slithered between the looming skeletons of buildings, choking the light of the sun to the faintest shimmer by which the bodies of those that had been out and going about their day when the blast had hit could be seen carpeting the street like melted candles. The dusty air burned the man’s all but entirely blind eyes and singed lips, causing him to turn his head toward the lifeless curdled stumps of pocked flesh where legs once were. The shattering of the window had absorbed enough to spare the rest of him from the initial blast, yet his legs had to suffer. But no more.

The man raised what was left of his vision to the suffocating sky, a dry tear duct begging for water that it didn’t have, and rolled into the void of a world that he had outlived.