It was a condemned warehouse in what used to be inside the Atlanta city limits. He slammed through the rusted remnants of a roll-up metal door and jumped off the loading dock. Something went wrong.

His skin was too tight. The world was fading. There was a floodlight. The light rained straight down; a hard, bright circle of asphalt was below him. It was getting farther away. Around him was the distinct sensation of infinite nothing. Then the light was gone. Then there was only the nothing.

His shirt began to glow the color of an iron not quite long enough in the forge: dark, blood, red. It illuminated the nothing.

His eyes hurt. The breath in his lungs made its escape, a screaming banshee into the darkness. An eternal moment later he heard himself blink. His heart drove blood through his head like hot nail. His chest convulsed, muscles in his neck stood out; he clenched his teeth but his lips lost the battle. Spasms shook his body as he inhaled nothing.

Shapes coalesced in the distant reaches of the void. Faint nebulae condensed and glowed, ghosts of stars twinkled in their hearts. It was all racing by him, trails of light streaked through the nothing.

He was flying. Falling. Flailing. No up, no down.

The lights in the distance poured themselves together around him, now drops of ink in a calm sea. Forms appeared. They stalked his periphery. Wolves, or lions; too big, too formless, to be real. Too real to be imaginary. Waves of color broke off of their starlight shoulders. Wispy rainbow wakes flared and faded in their passing.

A triptych tableau formed in front of him from the beasts’ cast off colors. In the dust swirling among the stalkers walked three humans. They were him. And not. He squinted against the brightness of the middle one’s eyes. They burnt off the haze between the two of them like the sun scouring the earth of a morning fog. He knew her eyes, they were his own.

Desperately, violently, he tried again to fill his lungs. Nothing. Heartbeats stretched his eardrums. She approached; now more solid than anything else had ever been. Her hand touched his chest. The metal of his shirt grew brighter; blood red became cherry, orange, yellow, white. The heat wrapped around his chest. The other figures moved among the waves of color. Both he and the woman shared their form. They stared at him; orange serpents swam through the gossamer strands of the watercolors that made up their bodies.

She moved her face close to him inspect the glowing shirt. Blue flame roiled behind her eyes. Her nose brushed against his stomach. Her chin touched his chest. Her lips rested on his cheek.

“Breathe.”

A blinding supernova erupted from his chest. The detonation erased the infinite nothingness and rewrought the world around him into painful, solid, reality once more.

He crashed awkwardly into the pavement; crumpled into a heap of heaving gasps.

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