Read Antsy Does Time for Free Online

but you’re Swedish,” I reminded him. “There aren’t any pyramids in Sweden.”
    He finished off the second N . “That’s only because Vikings weren’t good with stone.”
    I found myself involuntarily looking around for an escape route, and wondered if maybe I was a “not-in-my-airspace” type after all.
    Then Gunnar starts launching into all this talk about death throughout history, and how people in Borneo put their departed loved ones in big ceramic pots and keep them in the living room, which is worse than anything I’ve told my sister about our basement. So I’m getting all nauseous and stuff, and his mother calls out, “Dinner’s ready,” and I pray to God she’s not serving out of a Crock-Pot.
    â€œBorrowed time, Antsy,” he said. “I’m living on borrowed time.”
    It annoyed me, because he wasn’t living on borrowed time—he was living on his own time, at least for six months, and I could think of better things to do with that time than carving a tombstone.
    â€œWill you just shut up!” I told him.
    He looked at me, hurt. “I thought you of all people would understand.”
    â€œWhaddaya mean ‘me of all people’? Do you know something I don’t?”
    We both looked away. He said, “When that guy . . . the other day . . . you know . . . when he fell from Roadkyll Raccoon . . . everyone else was staring like it was some show, but you and I . . . we had respect enough to look away. So I thought you’d have respect for me, too.” He glanced at the unfinished gravestone before him. “And respect for this.”
    I hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, but it was hard to respect a homemade gravestone. “I don’t know, Gunnar,” I said. “It’s like you’re getting all Hamlet on me and stuff. I swear, if you start walking around with a skull, and saying ‘to-be-or-not-to-be, ’ I’m outta here.”
    He looked at me coldly, and said, insulted, “Hamlet was from Denmark, not Sweden.”
    I shrugged. “What’s the difference?”
    And to that he said, “Get out of my house.”
    But since we were in his backyard, and not in his house, I stayed put. He made no move to physically remove me from his presence, so I figured he was bluffing. I looked at that stupid rock that said GUNN in crooked letters. He had already returned to carving. I could hear that his breathing sounded a little bit strained, and wondered whether that was normal, or if the illness was already making it difficult for him to breathe. I had looked up the disease online—Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia had symptoms that could go mostly unnoticed, until the end, when your lips got cyanotic—which means they turn blue, like they do when you’re swimming in a pool someone’s too stinking cheap to heat. Gunnar’s lips weren’t blue, but he was pale, and he did get dizzy and light-headed from time to time. Those were symptoms, too. The more I thought I about it, the worse I felt about being so harsh over the tombstone.
    Then, on a whim, I reached into my backpack, pulled out a notebook and pen, and began writing something.
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œYou’ll see.”
    When I was done, I tore the page out of the notebook, held it up, and read it aloud. “‘I hereby give one month of my life to Gunnar Ümlaut. Signed, Anthony Bonano.’” I handed it to him. “There. Now you’ve got borrowed time. Seven months instead of six months—so you don’t gotta start digging your own grave for a while.”
    Gunnar took it from me, looked it over, and said, “This doesn’t mean anything.”
    I expected him to launch into some Shakespearean speech about the woes of mortality, but instead he showed me the paper, pointing to my signature, and said, “It’s not signed by a witness. A legal document