“After all of this, I’ll be free.”

A fat middle-aged man smiled as he placed a ceramic vase on the wooden floors of his apartment. He scoffed and smirked, scratching the side of his sweaty face as he pulled himself to breathe. His vision faded into clarity and obscurity by the second as his chest moved back and forth, but on his mark, his vision narrowed at the second he faced the walls of his room.

He grits his teeth, letting his breath cut through his molars as he frowned. The vases were in line, at least. He was surrounded by old wooden walls that gave up on sticking with the faded parchment that drooped down like rotting leaves that were a second late from ever tasting the rain. It was suffocating, and the ticking sound of the clock made it worse. His sweat drooped from his forehead and down his cheek until it reached his chin. The heart that he neglected synched in with that mechanical tick that its pace quickened in the midst of the empty dusty cabinets that caged him, giving him no room to breathe. His jaws felt loose, his teeth chattered, and as his vision blurs into the fear of uncertainty, he gathered this sense of hope on his right hand and pounded his chest as a wake-up call.

There the man found his reason to smile, then coughing a second later, realizing that he had hurt himself more than what he expected. He looked at his shaking hand and closed his eyes. With a heavy breath, he knitted his brows and walked towards his laptop, clearing the nervousness out of his throat.

His steps were heavy but he didn’t care. All the weight on his body has been pushed down to his legs that he chuckled at the thought that it was his own soul that was begging him to step back, but he pushed on with a nervous yet expectant smile.

His fingers seemed heavy, too, as he tried to smear his sweat over the pad of his laptop to move his cursor. The man pointed it to close a tab and moved to another one; he refreshed the page, allowing his heart to skip a beat before letting out a sigh of relief as soon as he saw the title of the page that said, “How to buff your luck? Simple 10 steps on how to change your destiny!”

He ran his eyes through the page, looking back to his room a couple of times to make sure that some of the vases were correctly placed until he got to the final step, which made him turn towards the ceramic head of a tiger baring its fangs. With another sharp breath, he picked it up and licked his dry lips. The man took a step back, squatted down, and placed it on the floor.

Then there came silence; nothing changed.

“Well,” he looked at both his hands, crumpling his face to hold back a tear. “I guess this is what I get for—”

His breath was cut short, his lungs were filled with air, and the last thing he felt was a glimpse of a sharp pain that ripped his body apart before turning everything black.