Number Twenty

This, the story that brings me to you, is one story in twenty. In the other nineteen I am dead. In five stories I’m dead of AIDS, having suffered every possible infection and died at home, in a variety of hospitals, and in the toilet of a theater. There are seven suicides between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. There are two terrible car accidents -- one involving a drunk driver and one that is entirely my fault. In one story I live only three days and die in an incubator as the nurses huddle on the other side of the room. In one story my father kills me, in self-defense. In another I am stabbed by a gang of bored teenage boys. (In seventeen lives out of twenty I am in trouble for staring.) One story ends on a bus in Punjab with a bomb. In number nineteen I die without explanation, falling down a staircase in the middle of the day.

This is not any of those stories. This is the story that brings me, alive, to you.