It's hard to keep your lips closed when you are in pain. The burning feeling made me feel scared and angry and worried. But I didn't say anything about it. I bit my cheek to keep from yelling. I knew I was supposed to be silent, and I was.
The hospital room was bright white. So clean. It was cleaner than anything I had ever seen before. It had shine. There were nurses and doctors in the hospital. A police came by. I didn't tell any of them nothing because I was still doing what I was told.
I cut my tongue out with a scalpel when they weren't looking. They shouldn't have left it there. They were scared - I could see in their eyes. They thought their jobs were long gone. They thought they were going to jail. But I kept my mouth shut and held the blood inside with my words.
I've been quiet for years now, and I don't miss talking. I said everything I needed to say with that scalpel. If you didn't listen, that's not my fault.
(Space reserved for Mader comments)
ReplyDeleteSo stark and powerful. LOVE that last paragraph. It punches back.
DeleteOoh, yes, such good stuff. I thought of James Ellroy. And the story itself is the scalpel.
DeleteYou’ve never been to this place before, but it feels like home. Not in that “didn’t we used to live here vibe” but in a deeper place, closer to your heart.
ReplyDeleteHeart. Home. Whole. When was the last time you felt whole? When was the last time you sat in a patch of green grass and looked into the blue, blue sky and felt…like there was absolutely nothing wrong? Not a pain. Not an ache. Not a worry. Not a regret. Not a nagging feeling that something vital had been forgotten. Just nothing. But. Peace.
This place isn’t green grass and blue sky but a rusty-orange haze over acres of concrete and asphalt. It’s cars rattling by, the grammar of industry, the punctuation of car horns, the paragraphs of planes flying overhead.
You don’t want to be on any of those planes. You don’t want to be anywhere else. You’re a walking, wheezing cliché from a motivational poster: Bloom where you’re planted. A pale tender shoot growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Some days you’re the shoot, some days you’re the sidewalk. It’s a sidewalk kind of day. You’re infrastructure. You’re conduit and rebar and junction boxes and studs and yards and yards of pipes and wiring. You walk through the detritus, thrilled by the undersides of things. The loading docks and the cross beams and the orange bollards and stacks and stacks of pallets.
You'll bloom here. You’re already part of the landscape.
I bet you can guess my favourite line: "It’s cars rattling by, the grammar of industry, the punctuation of car horns, the paragraphs of planes flying overhead." But it's all good. Second person seems to work so well for flash fiction, doesn't it?
DeleteI have been trying to convince my students how powerful and potent second person POV can be in flash fiction. This is a great example JD
DeleteThat phrase folks use: what possessed him? He supposed possession was as good a reason as any. He figured he knew these caves, had explored them many times in his childhood and youth, and where was the harm in a whim? How can it be wrong to feel home again?
ReplyDeleteHe knew there was a chamber beyond the second bulb of a tumescent tract, and in that chamber were sparkling and luminous stalactites. Viridescent claws of underworld gods. Who wouldn’t want to pass through a monster’s caliginous guts to see such rarities?
He hesitated at the entrance, which was small, but he’d made his way through smaller. His momentary uncertainty perhaps an echo of a future alarm, a faint warning broadcast. No equipment, no gear. He only had the flashlight on his phone, but that ought to be enough. He wasn’t going far.
Inside, he had an immediate choice of two tunnels and halfway assuredly picked the one on the right, which dropped through a sharp turn into a near vertical eight-inch squeeze he thought would open out and flatten out soon but he was already in it headfirst when it deadended ahead of him and too late he knew he was in a different tunnel from the one his memory had confidently drawn up and there was no way he was scrabbling backward over the lip he’d just traversed, upon which his body hinged awkwardly, and no one knew he was there, although he cried out regardless.
This silent place held him tight, though he tried, of course he tried, sporadically calling into the far reaches of the dark beyond his feet until his yells grew into shrieks. His voice a dry rasp, he cried for his mother and the pity made him cry more.
Soon his human sounds gave way to the sonar ping of liquids dripping somewhere and the plangent echoes of all the turns he had not taken.
His occasional struggles only wedged him further and after a while his battery died and within this unlit place he could hear only his own breathing, panicked and irregular as batflight in eventide, and then, soon after, the baritone seethe of his blood in his head like a tide over black pebbles on some dark and eldritch beach on which drear and lonely creatures lurched.
The pain in his skull built like a fireside bellows, pulmonary and hollow and vast, until he wished at last for the bliss of the void, the true void not this fraudulent limbo.
This death unmatched in abashment. Woe and heartshame to succumb so easily. Without a fight. Without even an adversary, unless you count cold granite his foe. Knowing he was led to a vainfoolish death, to an unjust calculus—something had possessed him and now he possessed nothing—gripped by malachite seams and the innermost slime of the moist, impassive earth. Ignominy and anguish. Nothing beyond desolation. No worse egress.
His last vision behind eyes that were dimmed and irrelevant was of times long past, a slow pan of a prairie with a crude wire fence limping kinked and halfstrung to a horizon like an edgewise portent of the iron tracks to come. A child’s sketch ahead of a film crew. Symbolic. Insouciant. Push in and there’s the tiny dried remnant of a prairie dog long since death had snatched and taunted it now peaceable and paltry and no longer disconsolate. Perhaps even laughing a little on the inside. At the foolishness of it all. The vanity. All things under and upon the heedless earth.
Damn. I had to read this twice. Word choice so stunning, with a horrifyingly beautiful story. Loving those long sentences, esp this one: "His occasional struggles only wedged him further and after a while his battery died and within this unlit place he could hear only his own breathing, panicked and irregular as batflight in eventide, and then, soon after, the baritone seethe of his blood in his head like a tide over black pebbles on some dark and eldritch beach on which drear and lonely creatures lurched."
DeleteThank you kindly. Short fiction is such a great vehicle for playing with that kind of thing.
DeleteThis is absolutely one of my nightmares. I agree with Boris, the writing is fantastic. I love the last sentence of the first paragraph especially …so simple and perfect.J
DeleteNo updates available. The words ring through your head. You’d counted on maybe two, three more shots at the most…but none? Zero? Nada? Your shoulders sag. The permutations of living the rest of your days on what you currently have installed spin around, form and unform patterns, familiar and unfamiliar. This is all you’re gonna get. Can it last? You can run schematics until you turn blue, but it’ll tell you the same damn thing. You’re stuck. Essentially you’ve reached the end of your operating capacity. No shiny new upgrades. Nothing. An old quote scratches its way out of your memory: “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”
ReplyDeleteBut you got duped. Had. Suckered. Hornswaggled by a grifter with white teeth and an oily smile. You’re stuck, pally. You’ve heard stories about the past, of folks degrading into undignified natural deaths. Stuck in a hospital bed, wearing a diaper, eating baby food, nurses who tend to you like so much furniture while they yammer on their cell phones to friends about how awful their jobs are.
This program was supposed to put an end to nursing home warehouses, to a slow, agonizing failure of bodily systems, to disputes about final wishes that often tear grieving family members limb from limb. It promised a dignified death at a time of your choosing, when you can properly bid farewell to your loved ones while you still have your full faculties, can make your wishes known and say what you’ve always wanted to say.
Now you’re working without a net, at the whim of your aging body. You can handle pain. Your biggest fear is losing your mind. Riding that hazy line when you’re just cognizant of what you’re losing. Coming back into your present no longer recognizing your house or your partner or your children.
You sit for a while, trying to make sense of your plight. Okay. Current operating system still functional, cool. For the time being, everything’s peachy. You have no idea when the software will crap out, but somehow humans had made it through thousands of years okay with the not-knowing part. Somehow they negotiated the uncertainty of death before scientists who hadn’t learned the lessons of science fiction started tinkering around with humanity.
But until you can somehow become chill with not knowing the time and manner and circumstances of your death, how can you keep the not-knowing from driving you insane?
You need an out clause. Quickly you pull up the contract, scan it for any language of mutual agreement to opt out of the arrangement, but you find none.
You also find nothing in the history networks about those who’d chosen to end their own lives. Unfortunately, the search prompts a series of messages to stream your way. Offers to upgrade at a discount. You close windows as fast as they pop up.
And then you freeze. After a moment, a small button appears in the empty space of your mind: Restart?
You want to agree. You should want to agree. Right? But the silence, the darkness. Something is so calming about it. Soothing. Like babies must feel when they finally get the thing they were crying for but couldn’t make words to ask. You float on that calm sea of not needing to decide. The button fades out. You barely hear the front door opening. You barely feel the needle going in. Then you feel nothing at all.
JD, that was absolutely chilling. Sent my mind wondering about the "before."
ReplyDeleteGreat use of quiet dread, and even though she made it home, I still felt unsettled.
ReplyDeleteYikes! I agree with Antrobus. JD
ReplyDelete