Fifty stories down, one way or the other. A second glance, a final chance.

Tilt.

My instinctive gasp is mimicked into a perfect synthetic echo by the forty-nine people gathered below. Forty-eight follow me with their sadistic eyes, save a single child with a perverse grip on her own innocence. From up high, I envy her.

A blinding flurry numbs my senses and I fall through them. Tens of stories passed, hundreds still untold, thousands yet unwritten. My life doesn’t flash before my eyes. To say so would imply that it loosely existed at all.

Three black doves swoop past me and cross paths with mine. Two diverge and disappear into the bright sky. One returns to my side. It plummets and then recovers, repeatedly, as if to remind me how to fly.

Zero.