I’m not expecting much. There’s little risk here.
A man jumps from the tenth story of a building. A crowd gathers – though not too close – to the scene of the act. You always need one person to alarm the ambulance; perhaps one to call the police, too. Â I’d recommend someone to clean up the mess.
The rest are mere witnesses. In all, a heartbreak for a few, an inconvenience for some, perhaps an envious end for others.
Now, there is someone else: the person looking down from the ledge. It’s hard to see them, as they’re so high up. There’s the obvious distraction down below, as well. They are shouting, screaming, so loudly that their throat is tearing. No-one hears.
There is another fall, eventually. It is slower than the last, and it has no end. Eyes blur eventually, as patterns appear in the cascading windows. The air numbs the face, strains the eyes and wipes away the evidence. Muscles brace, the mind clenches for impact, locked in eternal anticipation. Nothing comes.
I’m sorry that you may find the absence of entrails unfortunate. This is not a tale typed with bloodied fingers, or watched with whited eyes. I understand that there is little glory involved with saving someone who seems to be in no danger of death. I am cursed to care too much to abandon care, but I am as much dead as any man who lived.
3 comments
That last line is incredibly powerful………… not to take away from the rest of your post.
I know that feeling and the balance seems to be tipping towards abandoning care ….. for me anyway.
I’ve realized suicide is NOT about dying……….. it’s about turning off the mind and body of those who feel like they have already died inside.
Your words were haunting…
“Muscles brace, the mind clenches for impact, locked in eternal anticipation. Nothing comes.â€
No release…
I just read “I, Zombie†by Hugh Howey.
The book is a series of stories about the experience of becoming and being a zombie
His Zombies faces what may be the ultimate horror: complete lack of control over the bodies they inhabit while being fully conscious, including the pain, of everything they experience.
One of the zombies contemplates his marriage as he stumbles through the streets, the hunger for meet, live meet, “life’s†meet driving his body forward.
He notes the open gaping wounds of his torn arms, wounds that can never heal. He marvels how he took for granted that when alive these wounds could close and heal as he complained of the scares they left behind. He wonders at the times he lost his temper with his wife. The wound his words open, wounds that never fully closed, reopened to many times. He remembers how many time that in those moments he felt like he was observing himself, willing himself to stop, but unable, a passenger along for the ride…
It is a truth that the bite of the undead transforms the bitten into one of the dead. The words that bit into the flesh of his wife, parts of her died. She to was a Zombie…
How many of us are zombies?
Is the zombie apocalypse a reality that has been ongoing for years only more subtle, not enough for anyone to notice until too late?
That the thing with being one of the dead, the death does not come with the loss of consciousness.
No we see and feel everything… condemned to follow a hunger we do not get to understand, a hunger that is never quenched. Passengers of a dead “thing” going though the motions of life as we watch helplessly as our teeth sink into the flesh of those that still live. Mindlessly hoping that this time the meet will sustain us and bring us back…
Death seeking out life… the hunger of the zombie is a hunger for another’s life.
Yeah…