Maddie Adler’s Time of Death

Maddie Addler was supposed to die at 3.44 PM yesterday. She'd known this long before she understood what dying meant. Like everyone, her time of death was stamped on a piece of paper, right next to her time of birth—as if the end of a life were no more than a date in the almanac, another turn of the seasons, dawn carelessly giving way to night.

In the days leading up to her demise, she did what had to be done, the hollow ceremonies expected of the dying. She bid farewell to everyone she knew—at least the ones still alive, and even those were people she’d never cared to really know.

Then, she locked herself in her apartment.

Of all the ways one could choose to embrace death—including at a death centre, among unfamiliar faces in an unfamiliar bed—she decided to die alone in her home.

With nothing else to do but wait, she began piecing together the timeline of her life.

In the beginning, she dreaded the marker of time. Each year felt like another weight wrapped around her ankles, crushing her bit by bit. Then, she couldn’t remember the exact day, or even the year, when the passage of time became what it was—another sunset, another sunrise. She couldn’t recall when she had started to forget to fear in favor of life.

A life not very different from a slumping wooden structure, like a pile of kindling, deserted and abandoned, yet not empty.

Others around her seemed to be doing far better. Some had a full, long life ahead of them, and the ones who didn’t took from life what they could. But she saw her existence for what it was: a wayward life dragged on course, propelled down its limited path she had no control over.

As her time grew closer—years, months, then days—she made peace with her impending death.

She thought she was ready, that she'd had years to come to terms with her fate. She thought it would be easy, as easy as falling off a ledge. And yet, on her final night, sitting alone in her apartment, her heart racing as the grey light of the morning crept across the starless sky, was spent like a sentence. Every second was merciless, hammered down like the final nails sealing her coffin lid. Not once did time seem to slow down, nor did it seem to quicken. But, like everything does, the night ended too, and petrifying as it was, the morning spurred her into action.

She could no longer just sit; she needed to move, do something.

She showered till the water grew cold, brewed tea from an unopened packet that she would never finish. She lifted the mug, inhaled the scent, but—not wanting to dislike one of the last things she did—didn't take a sip. She arranged the books on her shelf by color, then rearranged them by alphabet, plucked out a book, and, on the back of it, she scribbled her last words, “Life is a corner in hell.”

And just like that, the morning bled into afternoon, leading up to her final minute.

Lying down felt akin to surrendering before death had a right to its claim, so she sat at the kitchen table as the clock inched forward to 3:44 PM. They say it happened in an instant: one moment, you're alive, and the next, you're gone. They say for most, it's a few heaving breaths or a painless twist in the chest. Yet, her fists were clenched, her eyes clamped shut, as if she was waiting for an assault that could come at any moment.

But even her final seconds couldn't thwart her mind from drifting like a swimmer buoyed by the sea, plagued with imaginings of hell—the endless, unspeakable torments her mother had threatened her with if she failed to embrace God’s will. A terror she’d forgotten for years—until now, when her dead mother stood over her, inviting her to taste its punishments.

Suddenly, her morbid musings halted as she realized it should’ve been long past her time. Posture rigid, she wondered bitterly if this was what dying felt like—a crawl on a path to infinity. Inhaling sharp, shallow breaths, Maddie sat still as time forged on. And when, even after several moments, she still felt no heaving, no wheezing, no pain, she opened her eyes in stunned disbelief.

Her gaze cut to the clock: it was 3:56 PM.

Suspecting delirium—a scenario created by the psyche refusing to accept its end—she simply sat there facing the clock, willing it to race ahead, willing it to still.

An hour passed, and she could still feel the familiar expansion and contraction in her chest. The silence stoppering her ears retreated, replaced by the sounds from the street. She could again feel the warmth of the falling sun cutting through the curtains at her back. Yet, she was afraid to move even an inch. She didn't know what she should do now, what any of this meant. The time of death was supposed to be exact to a second, as brief as the draw of a breath.

Not daring to move, to hope, bewilderment kept her frozen.

***

The sun gradually fell, and, with it, the last dregs of light—the room plunged into darkness. Unable to hold still any longer, Maddie slowly unfolded her taut frame from the chair. With measured steps, she moved to the window and peered down at the street. Life went on—a churn of strangers doing familiar things.

Yet, her reason kept turning and twisting to make any other sense of what had happened than the inevitable conclusion that she'd lived.

She'd read about this; only one man had ever beaten this game of death. It never arrived for him—not on the day, the next, or the days after. The day he lived, the whole world stood still as people cried in the streets. For a fleeting moment, despair was palpitant with hope.

But hope is also a poisonous pollen blown.

When everyone else continued to die at their designated time, the world crashed and burned. Everyone wanted to know how he'd done it. But now Maddie knew he hadn't done anything at all.

Now what? The darkness whispered in her ear.

She hadn't thought further than the road leading her, only up to several hours ago. Anchored in the sureness of death, she’d ended her life as she knew it. She'd completed every step of the mandatory checklist, though she fleetingly wondered: what could they have done if she hadn't followed it? You couldn't penalize the dead.

Another thought formed, and a sob of frustration escaped her throat—with death's peace lost, she couldn’t fathom rising to do it all again. Her mind wandered in every direction—to elation from disbelief, rage to self-pity—until it felt like she was slowly going mad.

Finally, bleary from tiredness, right before sleep took over, she remembered how she loved listening to the patter of rain. It would not rain for months, but as the seasons turn, it will come. She could almost hear the sound of rain as she fell asleep. And hope took root in her like a tree.

The next morning, she watched the bruised reds and golds of the sun spill across the sky, trying to recall the last time she'd seen the morning arrive. Mornings tend to forge an illusion, distorting reality with newness. But this morning was truly new, no longer an extension of her previous life.

A quiet thrill surged through her at the thought that she could now do what should've been impossible—walk out into the world again.

She loved walking.

It had taken her years to learn the city, each step like a syllable, until it spoke to her in a language she was fluent in. But today, she wanted to find a new phrase.

But before stepping out, there was something she needed to do.

She scrounged her apartment for quarters and cents still lying around unfound—because not even miracles could survive without money. Thirty minutes later, she walked down the street, coins jangling in her pocket, a total of five dollars and forty cents.

***

The sun was high in the cloudless sky when Maddie came to a stop on a narrow, winding street, before a small coffee shop. A faint bell announced her arrival, and she was swallowed by the coffee-scented warmth inside.

She nodded in greeting at the girl behind the counter, and marvelled at her tightly spun curls for a moment before wandering deeper. The cafe seemed fairly empty, save for a man sitting on an accent chair at the end of a row, with headphones on and a laptop open across his lap.

Her gaze drifted to the narrow aisles on the man's left, lined with rows of books, and her heart swelled. Heaven, she always imagined, would be nothing but shelves upon shelves of books. As she neared the aisles, she closed her eyes for a few seconds to indulge in the unique smell of old books.

In the mood to be lost to another world, she started browsing through the fantasy section—not surprised that most titles were from yesteryears, with the arrival of new books now being a rarity. She picked out a thick volume, loving its weight in her hands, and carried it away to a corner.

An hour later, she found herself reading the same line over and over, the heady scent of cinnamon overpowering her every thought. Giving in, she walked up to the counter, book in hand, finger wedged between pages to keep her place. The girl behind the counter looked up and smiled at her approach, and Maddie thought she must still have a long way to go, wishing it to be true.

"Can I—" The sound lodged in Maddie’s throat for just a second, the stiffness of a muscle long unused. She hadn’t spoken to someone in days. She tried again, "Can I get one of whatever you're baking?"

The girl's smile widened. "It's our house-special Apple crumble pie. There are only six slices of these in the world at the moment," she said with a wink as she reached over to pull out a piece. “Do you need anything to go with it? I make great lattes," she added with a bashful grin.

How she’d love to sip a latte while she read, Maddie thought. "How much for the pie? And the coffee?"

"Two-eighty for the Pie and three-fifty for the coffee."

Maddie cringed, palming the quarters and cents in her pocket, and said, "No, just the pie, please."

The girl glanced at the loose change Maddie placed on the counter. "You know what,” she said, “I'll throw in the coffee for free.”

“Oh no. You don’t have to do that.”

“We've got Tuesday specials today," the girl shrugged, smiling. "Consider it part of the deal."

"But it's Wednesday", Maddie corrected her. "Maybe you should hold off on the coffee," she said, pushing the change toward her.

The girl stilled, pulled out her phone and checked the screen. "Nah, it's Tuesday," she said. "It's no big deal. I'll get your coffee started."

Maddie didn't hear past "It's Tuesday." The words didn’t immediately compute. For several seconds, they circled in her head without form or gravity, flotsam on some mental tide—until abruptly, they aligned into sense. It can't be, she thought, in panic. And then, like an Easter egg in a movie previously unnoticed, another thought burst forth—they never came. They should've, but they didn't.

She opened her mouth, and out came a breathless tangle of sound, "whattimeisit?"—a garbled, awkward string, barely recognizable as a question.

"What was that?" the girl asked cocking her head to one side as she expertly tightened the portafilter.

"What…time is it?"

"Oh, it should be late afternoon," the girl said, "if you give me a moment, I can check it on my phone for you."

The air has turned to stone inside Maddie's throat, leaving it stifled, silent. "Don't bother," Maddie mumbled, resigned. She already knew it was too late. It was almost time. With the book still clutched in her hand, she started walking away.

"Your coffee!" the girl yelled, flustered, from behind her.

But Maddie didn't hear her. The only sound in her ears was her own voice, telling her life was a bitter hag who used pain as a punchline. Maybe death was better after all—at least it told no lies.