Hope springs eternal Sarah thought as she kept swiping left on the dating app. All of these men were so much older than her twenty-two years of age. Some as much thirty years older than she was. Her mom had told her that when she was in her twenties she had her pick of any guy she wanted around her age.
There was no way that was going to happen now. Boys are so dumb.
Heading into the house Sarah slipped off her shoes, sliding them under the tiny wooden bench, before she hung her coat on the coat rack.
Walking through the house Sarah found her mother in the kitchen working on supper while she watched the news.
“Another mass suicide,” the news anchor announced in his pleasent baritone. “Took place in the business district today. Fifteen young men, some as young as sixteen, threw themselves off of a building believing that they would be among the chosen few.” The news anchor paused while he looked deadpan into the camera. “None of them walked away.”
“Dammit.” Sarah’s mother cursed. “Why are they in such a hurry to kill themselves?”
Sarah knew that her mother knew the answer to that question. It was just so implausible that it didn’t make any sense. None of it really made sense anymore.
Death used to mean the end of things. The end of suffering. The end of atrocities. Just the end. That had changed about a decade or so ago. People started to stop dying. In fact, they didn’t just not die when they were killed, they never died ever. But, there was a catch. Well, two catches really. The first one was that whatever condition your body was in right before you died would be the condition your body was in for the rest of eternity. So if you were old and sick before you died you didn’t magically become better. You simply stayed weak, sick, and old – forever. Just as the undying body could not take damage or die, it cannot be healed. It was as if the body was held in a freeze frame that could move, think and feel. For some it wasn’t a gift, it was a hell.
The second catch was that there was no way to test someone to see if they would be immortal. Sure doctors and scientists had run more tests than sand on the beach but none of them have found a definitive way to positively identify if a person would be undying. In fact the only definitive way to know if you were immortal was to die.
This culmination of the unbelievable led to many young men and women killing themselves to find out if they were, in fact, immortal. Who wanted to live forever in an old, sickly, weak body when you could live forever young and powerful? Of course guys being guys, many more of them killed themselves thinking they were the strongest or to prove to each other that they weren’t pussies. Which is what had led to Sarah having a somewhat shallow dating pool to swim in.
Fifteen more young men dead. Sarah thought that pushed the total for her city somewhere upwards of 700 for this month. Some of them were too young, but there were probably eight to ten of them around her age. All gone now.
Sarah looked down at the app again. The man was handsome nice smile, nice shirt, good hair. He was on the far side of thirty though. Usually, this would automatically kick the guy out of contention. More than ten years older than her had always seemed creepy. Sarah sighed as she realized her mind was changing. She realized that the problem with being young and dumb is that you’re young and dumb. Which is why so many young guys were killing themselves. Sarah sighed again, smiled slightly, then swiped right.
CalvinTheAuthor 