Muscle weakness, headache, shifting liver, increased sweating, weight gain, musical warts, weight loss, itching, dry mouth, heightened arousal, color blindness, luminous toes, coughing, hair loss, and most importantly…

Death.

A strange side effect, he’d thought, for a drug created to cure mortality. But he’d taken the pill anyway. That’s what they were paying him for. And as it turned out, they weren’t paying nearly enough.

The spark of life returned to his clouded eyes and he sat up with a sudden gasp. That had been the fourth death, and el despertar like that was no divertido. He had a moment to mumble, “Por qué estoy thinking en Spanglish?” before he died for a fifth time.

The effects of the pill were temporary for the sake of test subject safety and wore off after the seventh day. Over the course of the week he’d died and returned to life exactly one hundred and seventy-four times, and all he had to show for it was an itchy bald spot, a basic understanding of Spanish, and a glowing pinky toe.