Content: Suicidal thoughts, Self harm (burning)

"If you feel nothing when you die, then what's the difference between being alive and being dead?" Arthur has his face burrowed in the pillows on the couch and his voice is smothered by smoke-stained plaid. He doesn't know if the man with the painted face is there and he doesn't have the energy to lift his head to check. When only the desolate nighttime sounds of the apartment answer him he decides he's either talking to himself or the man with the painted face doesn't think he's worth speaking to today.

His arm throbs where he's stubbed cigarettes out onto his skin, starlike points of searing heat. He'd taken the lighter to himself too, when the few seconds it took for his lungs to inhale was too long for him to go without feeling anything but the emptiness inside himself. The wounds made by living flame are misshapen and strange next to the perfect little halos made by dying ash.

"What's the difference between being alive and being dead?" Arthur asks again. He tries to imagine how the man with the painted face would answer him. He can never see his face clearly in his mind but he can always hear his voice, sometimes more distinctly than he can hear his own. "When you're dead they burn all of you at once."

Somewhere inside himself he hears the man with the painted face cackle.