new story that is very raw, in a few ways, but in the way you might notice most is that i haven’t edited yet. i wanted to write it for a while and now that it’s written i want to put it into the world before i look back on it and see what i think. what DO i think? i dunno. i needed to write it, but how i feel about it i can’t say.
PLUG
I am ready to go.
The tides rising by the hour, higher by the moment.
The momentum washing away the sand until there is nothing left.
In the halls you can hear the shish-shish-shish-shish of the people in white as they buzz between rooms. Never phased. Never given pause. Professional to a fault as the children, the babies in their cradles, dream of sweet, deadly silence.
Not me. I dream of people shaped ash, falling from the sky.
I dream of waiting graves and crying children.
Late in the night you can hear the families as they whisper through choked voices and discuss courses of action. Watching the tide wash in, tide wash out, bringing and taking their loved ones away, then doing it all over again.
The sounds of the machines are maddening. Chases thoughts from your head, reason from your mind. Never knowing if something is failing or running correctly. Never knowing the difference between the heartbeat of Death and the pounding in your own chest. Watch as one by one the families come, the families go, sometimes smiling, sometimes crying, but always gone while you remain. And there are no words. There are no gestures. There are no lamps to rub to take away the welling tears, the cracking voices. There is only silence, heavy and useless and saying so much more than you ever could. Hoping that a hand on a wrist is enough but nothing is enough. The only thing that can fill the hole in them now is dirt, so much dirt.
The days blend and things you had taken for granted before, like hot meals, sleep, and the numbing simplicity of work are lost between the days. And the waters rush forward and the waters rush back and each day there is less and less and it all starts to slip away. Memories, cherished, beautiful things we show more attention than our own children.
And god how the darkness calls.
Anything, you’d do anything to stop the butterflies from swirling inside your stomach, anything to stop the humming of the machines, anything to stop the tears that threaten to split you in two.
Darkness.
Brother Darkness, who has always been there, waiting, patient as a lover, for you to return. And you inch closer and closer, like the rolling tide that takes our memories one by one, but as close as you are there are always the cold white tiles and the dirty-clean hands and the forced smiles waiting on you return.
And all you want is to scream, to scream until you wake up into the life you remember, the life before the endless hallways, and the murmuring nurses, and living among ghosts. Hell isn’t a concept; it is here, this place, these walls, this food, this life. Hell is the unending mundanity of survival.
And you ask, you plead to a god you don’t know if you ever believed in until now, pleading for the Darkness to wash over this world of light, this land of Light, to wash over you and return you to the sea where you drown in all your misplaced memories. In answer there comes the beeping of another room and the call for the crash team and there, there if you listen close you can hear the sigh of Death as it calls another home.
And I am ready.
I can feel the tide washing me away and I am ready.
And I am ready.
I can hear their whispers coming from the Light, can hear the tears in their voices as the machines push the tides away.
And I am ready.
I watch the tide carry my memories out to sea, further, further, further, gone.
And I am ready.
And I am ready.
And I am ready.
I am ready to join with the dark.
– chris arrr – 2.28.12
like it? go buy a book.
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 