I’d gone to bed hours ago, but I was still awake, staring alternately at the time flashing red beside me and at the ceiling, dimly lit. It had rained and the air was sticky and hot. My mouth tasted of blood. It was the same night I’d been having all summer.

I’d become an insomniac thinking about all the lives I could have had, the other people I could have been. I would rather be any of them, those myriad not-me’s, with their dozen different smiling wives and their hundred more fulfilling jobs. I drifted off.

I woke not enough hours later when my car alarm went off and damned the paper boy. I’d stopped taking the paper two years since. He didn’t care.

On a whim I picked up the unwanted paper and flipped to the obituaries in a sudden flash of that morbid fascination we all share. Everyone reads them sometimes, I think, and stares at the pictures of the dead old people while they were still young. They look too much like us.

I was understandably confused to see my own picture.