Today's OneWord: Dying

I wanted to get up. I wanted to get up badly. I stared upward at the ceiling, which seemed to bend and dip and curve with each slow drop and laborious rise of my eyelids. This was no ceiling. This was an all-consuming plaster maw, its lips snapping for sustenance as it swelled toward me, ready to snap my soul up in its weary jaws.

I was dying. I knew that now. My hand kept twitching against my stomach where the pain first began. Now the flame was in my chest, and it was burning, deep into my weathered ribcage, so battered after so many long and dreary years.