“Hey, no pressure, but I’m going to need you to throw my corpse into a volcano.”

N. T. Lazer
2 min readMay 15, 2020
Photo by Filipe Dos Santos Mendes on Unsplash

“Your corpse?” I asked.

“Yeah, like, my dead body,” he shrugged.

“So, like when you die, you want to be cremated in a volcano?”

“Cremated? What? No, I want you to scoop me up and toss me right into a volcano,” he explained, much like a teacher would a homework assignment.

“Why tell me? Just write it in your will or something. Your kids will probably do it for you.”

“Will? Kids?? Where do you think we are?”

I remembered the plane we were standing in. And the fact that it was crashing. And I was wearing the only parachute.

“Oh, right, sorry.”

“So, I’m gonna jump. I don’t want my body burning in a fiery explosion. I want it’s splattered remains to burn in a fiery volcano, got it?” he spoke slowly.

“Splattered remains?” I asked.

He sighed.

“Can I just have the parachute?”

“No way, man. I don’t want to die!”

“I know! Then listen to me! Are you listening?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This plane is crashing!” he started. I looked around. Yep, plane definitely going down.

“Uh-huh.”

“We are gonna jump at the same time,” he continued. My eyebrows knit together for a second, then I remembered what he was talking about.

“Uh-huh,” I responded.

“I am going to die on the pavement below.”

I stared, scratching my head.

“Pavement?” I asked.

“The ground! THE FLOOR!!”

“Oh, right, right.”

“Then, you take me to a volcano. Got it?”

“Sure thing, got it.”

He nodded, gripped my arm, and we jumped together. As we fell, he looked at me wide-eyed.

“Where’s the parachute???”

“What? Parachute? That definitely wasn’t part of the plan you just laid out.”

His eyes glazed over as if he had come to some sort of realization. I would have asked him about it, but he drifted away from me as we fell. That was pretty mean of him. I decided I wouldn’t toss him in the volcano after all.

--

--

N. T. Lazer

A microfiction, flash fiction, and general fiction author. With more stories at https://ntlazer.substack.com/