Last Night

Last Night is a short story by Laura van den Berg. You can read it online here. It begins,

I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died.

The thing is — it never happened.

This was many years ago.

I didn’t think about that night, my last night, for a long time and then one day I woke up and it was all I could think about.

Let me try and explain — I’ve spent years cultivating a noisy life. I live in a city riddled with unending construction projects, in an apartment above a bar. I see student after student during office hours; I let their words replace my thoughts. I volunteer at a women’s crisis center in my neighborhood. I listen to the women tell me what’s happened to their lives. Recently, though, silence has snuck in. For one thing, the bar closed the day after Thanksgiving without any warning at all, casting the whole block in quiet.

I blame that shuttered bar for the return of my last night.

I was seventeen and I had been in this place for ten months, receiving treatment for my various attempts to kill myself. My parents had mortgaged their house to keep me there and it was only in my last two months that I agreed to talk to them on the phone and even then it was mostly out of boredom. I was that angry they wanted me to live.