Time to Say Goodbye

The following morning I wanted to stop and get her flowers but no shops were open yet, disgusted with the times shop keepers kept, I rode on to work. Ted was already there. There was a truce between us concerning Amy, and since she was so much happier these days, he stopped off every morning, just to make sure she was still okay I supposed. I walked through the outside door and stood on the threshold of the back door. Ted was crying and Amy's drawer was open. I was immediately concerned and stalked into the room.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"She's dead." He choked on another sob. How could he tell?

I walked right up to the drawer and looked down at Amy. When I had closed the drawer last night, she looked like a living human being who had gone to dreamland. What I looked at now wasn't Amy. There was nothing left but her bones and a few pieces of brown, dried out skin. Her beautiful face was a skull. Her eyes were gone. Death grinned back at me - it had the last laugh. My lip trembled. I was angry because my lip was trembling. I wanted to punch the skull in its mouth because my lip was trembling. Everything inside me rose up in a single moment and exploded behind my eyes.

"Jesus God." I said as my legs collapsed under me. I hit my head against the edge of the drawer as I fell. I lay on the floor, absolutely stupefied. I couldn't manage a coherent thought, never mind a coherent word. I did not cry. The tears fell out of my eyes unbidden. I did not scream inside my mind, and scream and scream until the sound of the screaming in my head drowned out everything else. After a very long time, someone helped me to sit up. They fussed with my head. All I could hear was my breathing. One part of me said 'breathe', the other part said 'I can't'. I tried to focus on the face in front of me, but he wasn't making any sense. I felt a prick on my arm and then the welcoming darkness rose up and enfolded me. I was dying, the darkness was death. I welcomed it and sunk gratefully into it.

Everything pained, it seemed. My head, my heart and for some reason my ankle. I thought when you were dead you weren't supposed to feel anything. I was probably in hell. My punishment seemed to be a chattering at my ear and someone constantly nudging me. It could have been much worse but this was beginning to irritate me, so I turned my head and opened my eyes and told my mother to stop nudging me. She burst into tears and I wondered why my mother was in hell. Then I wondered why hell looked like a hospital room. And then everything came back in a rush. Amy. It felt like someone had put their hand around my heart and was squeezing it, painfully. In fact it felt like a giant hand and it was simultaneously squeezing my chest and choking me. I was crying. Amy.

A nurse came and fussed and my mother eventually left. My head hurt and I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Ted was sitting where my mother had been. He was holding a blue stuffed teddy-bear.

"Stealing from the babies in pediatrics huh?" It fell flat when he looked at me solemnly. Amy.

"No, I leave that to young men who are wet behind the ears like you." He'll be okay.

"I have no idea why Jeanie thinks you need this, but she threatened me that she wouldn't make me coffee for a whole month if I didn't look after this little baby toy. So, here's your baby toy."

"Tell Jeanie I said thanks." The office girl, I didn't really take note of her before.

"Tell her yourself, here she comes. Tell her, you'd like her to visit on her own from now on. I'll see you back at work when they decide to kick you out." Snarkey hey? I smiled, funny old guy, but totally worth knowing.

"Hi." Jeanie said from the other side. I turned my head to look at her. She had brown eyes, the colour of chocolate, with little gold flecks in them. I glanced over the rest of her and smiled.

"Hi."

END