I could clearly see her heart. It was within plain sight.
It was getting clenched in a cage of bony fingers which was tightening around it. Stronger and faster, it was trying its best to beat inspite of it, its bulbous, morphing redness barely contained in between the bars.
She tried to swallow, shoving a certain emptiness down her gullet but it just wouldn’t go down as if all the vacuum in the world gravidly swelled to lay claim to her tender pathways. Her face grew pale and blue.
I felt as if all her color was rapidly commanded, polarized instantly into a spinning vortex at the very centre of an unnamed spot, deep in the very inside of her, just below her diaphragm. I imagined her dizzying in a swoon any moment now but I have no idea what still kept her standing. Perhaps it was me.
“There’s been a car crash.”
It was getting cold, really, really cold and very, very quickly. Her hand, seeming suddenly old and hideously shriveled, reached out to the edge of the vanity as did mine. She needed to balance.
Rising above everything that was all choked up inside, a mumble, barely audible and most dry, surfaced, “She was there, wasn’t she?”
“Yes. She died on the spot.”
“What about him?”
“He breathes; on the ventilator.”
She had no idea what that meant. Her brain could not grapple with the science of it. I could feel a hundred odd sparks being born and instantly dying within her, the static making the hair at the back of her neck and mine, stand on end. She knew she would have to step out. She knew she would have to go.
She gazed into the mirror. Her eyes, first gently sweeping to it and then transfixed. She was plunging into her eyes, closely, deeply and then into mine. The electricity her body was making bounced off the mirror through her eyes searing my nothingness with an icy flame. It felt as if she sensed that I was inside of her, that we are stitched at the eyes. She was clearly unafraid.
What do I do Shiro? Do I take him away? Tell me. All I have to do is hold out my hand.
She could hear me. I echoed inside her shell. She stood there, gazing and unflinching, lips un-quivering, stitched shut. Mute.
-
He lay there, oblivious. The machine pumping into his lungs as well as the oiling would permit, in solemn synchrony.
I knew she could not see him crouched on the floor in the far corner of the room, battered, cut, spangled with our drying blood.
Tell me Shiro. What do I do? Do I take him away?
She could not even get herself to want to reach out to his hand.
-
The clock was ticking. She blinked like it hurt. The stitching was unraveling. We were coming apart. We were peeling off, separating ever so silently like the bark off a tree.
“Take him away” she willed inside of her, still choking and stepping back to turn out of the room.
From where I was, I knew she meant every word.
From where I was, I knew she meant every word.
-
The worst thing anyone can do is keep from someone things they truly deserve to know.
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