“A Movie About How I Kicked the Bucket”

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  At first glance, the page looked like any other standard YouTube window. Noah had no time to examine further—the video began to play automatically as soon as the page loaded.

  The perspective was strange. It was as if the camera were lodged between the operator’s eyes. The picture shook constantly, never still for even a moment, and the focus was so narrow that most of the screen was a blurred haze, only the very center revealing things with some clarity.

  “Is this how human eyes are supposed to see?” Noah muttered under his breath.

  Thanks to such “cinematography,” understanding anything was incredibly difficult. Several times, he hit pause, squinting hard at the flickering frame. The video showed a dark corridor with a faint glow leaking beneath a door at the far end. Nothing particularly remarkable, but Noah suddenly felt a wave of nausea. He quickly sat down on the floor, breathing deeply. Broken scraps of memory surfaced. His mind was slowly reassembling itself, and it wasn’t happy about forgetting things.

  After regaining some balance and wiping the sweat from his forehead, Noah glanced at the tablet again and pressed play.

  The operator crossed the corridor in seconds. With a practiced movement, he flung the door wide open. The picture jolted violently, and a moment later, a leather backpack was tossed carelessly into a corner of the room. The video quality was too poor to capture the logo on the bag’s front, but another surge of nausea sharpened Noah’s memories into 4K resolution. This time, he clenched his teeth and endured, determined not to pause. The sooner he got through this, the sooner he could throw the cursed tablet into the abyss where it belonged.

  Unfortunately, the next few frames destroyed his brave, masochistic plan. The instant he saw the room’s interior, a sharp pain stabbed his temples, and he instantly rolled his eyes upward, refusing to look any further.

  “All right, all right… pause exists for a reason…” he growled through clenched teeth.

  The grotto and abyss growled back at him in echoes, displeased with the broken silence.

  The room in the video was his own. Noah remembered not just the room—he remembered much more. Images poured back into his head—family, friends, acquaintances met along life’s crooked paths. Personalities encountered in the vastness of the internet. And also those who hated him, with good reason. Noah had never cared too much about them. If everyone only loves you, then what kind of life is that?

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  As the pain in his head ebbed, Noah became nearly certain that none of the haters had anything to do with the circumstances of his death. In fact, no living being at all had been responsible. Well...except perhaps for one idiot…

  “Unbelievably stupid,” he sighed deeply, finally lowering his gaze to the screen again.

  The video still focused stubbornly on the center, but now he saw his killer. Or rather, the thing that killed him. He himself had bought it in parts and screwed it together at the head of his bed, so he could keep things within reach. A shelf. Two screws in a plasterboard wall. Two thin, cursed screws! And he had kept piling more and more weight onto it, until one day the shelf began to groan beneath the burden. Noah even remembered joking that if it groans, it means it’s alive—so it’s fine. His father used to say the same thing, though not about shelves—about his patients.

  Noah also remembered thinking, one day those weak screws would give out, the whole load would come crashing down, and there would be trouble.

  And that, he was convinced, was exactly what had happened.

  When he pressed play again, neither the nausea nor the pain returned. He simply watched the familiar room unfold before him. The operator stripped off his jacket and collapsed into bed, shoes still on, utterly exhausted. The bed, as always, shifted and thumped against the plasterboard wall. The shelf gave a quiet creak, almost apologetically. In the video, you could barely hear the moment when both screws ripped free from the wall.

  But the very last frame captured something fascinating.

  Noah finally understood why the video had been titled “A Movie About How I Kicked the Bucket.”

  When the shelf came crashing down on his head, his feet really did shoot upward—half a meter into the air.

  “Bloody hell…” Noah muttered.

  He was dead. A fact. But now he desperately wished someone else could be blamed for it. One of those who had hated him could have shown up with a gun, a chainsaw, or a poisoned cup of tea. That would have been a proper crime story.

  But this?

  His family would find him stiff and lifeless because his own shelf had toppled onto his head? God forbid the newspapers printed it, listing every last thing that had been on that shelf—including his scribbled poetry and unfinished novellas.

  And if someone shared those novellas on Facebook?

  “Bloooooody hell,” he groaned, clutching his head in despair.

  The tablet lay abandoned on the ground, still showing his twitching feet. His mother could never stand it when he fell asleep with shoes on. Of course, it happened rarely, but… it did happen. And now Noah imagined her not missing the chance—she would surely mention it when the coffin was being lowered into the earth. She was one of those women who always sought the positive side of things. Even at funerals.

  Yes, she would not let the opportunity slip by.

  Grabbing the tablet, Noah was about to hurl it into the abyss when the foolish device beeped again.

  

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