Tag: Grief

Short Story: Then What?

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Sounds and smells of hammered and welded steel emanated incessantly from the garage. Edwin Malcolm’s neighbors had long since resorted to ear-plugs, letting come what may. Even in the middle of the night– or rather, especially in the middle of the night, Edwin found need to be working on something. The middle-aged inventor was a spitting image of a mad-scientist: his hair wild, white, and clothing appropriately frumpled. He fell short at evil genius, thus was left merely a lonely, sad man pitied by even the local police.

That had not always been the state of things. Edwin was once a prominent, high-school science teacher. He inspired even the laziest students to sit up, take notice. His enthusiasm and unparalleled respect garnered him more than one “Teacher of the Year” award. The transition to reclusive hermit obsessively working nights had come about tragically. Indeed, his first night that rolled over into day– and set his diurnal hibernation in motion– had been the same his wife was hit by a drunk driver. She lasted all of twelve hours. By noon the next day she was dead, along with any hope for Edwin’s sanity.

He took indefinite sabbatical, hadn’t returned since. No-one had the heart to cut off his benefits– not even the state-people that managed to rouse him from sleep during the day. He was less than half a man now. Even when others came for condolences, they found a slowly disintegrating husk of a man. The clean-shaven, well-groomed man was now a scruffy, stinking, Gollum-like creature with little to say, let alone teach.

His tragic demise spread so far and wide most of his former students came to console him. Always he was awoken from sleep, looking paradoxically as if he’d not had any in weeks, and stinking of sweat and day-old whiskey. Contrary to revulsion, both host and guest settled in for short, tired conversations. Such moments made Edwin’s change most obvious. He was not the razor-honed, one-track mind his students had known. Rather, he was scatter-brained, anxious, always accommodating but to a point where nothing deep could ever be broached. Guests invariably left dejected, and Edwin lapsed back into exhaustion until night when work began again.

One, former-student sought to change things. It had taken ages for news of his state to reach her, but she found it best to seek him in his natural habitat. Over a decade had passed since he’d impacted her life, but to discredit it over that missed the enormous contribution he’d made to her life. Denise had been a student whose school-life was an escape from her hellish home-life. Instead of using that time wisely, she made trouble, fought, failed classes, and everything else such kids did at her age. Years later, she’d become the first to agree she’d been one.

Edwin’s house appeared as night set. Winter’s early darkness hung heavy overhead. Denise was used to the cold. Her most recent job had been in a harsher clime, but somehow this cold felt excessive. Negative temperatures in the midwest? Who’d ever heard such nonsense? Still, she wouldn’t leave without seeing him.

She thunked a triplet on the door. The sound should’ve been lost in the garage’s clatter. Somehow, Edwin heard it. Or perhaps, he sensed her shivering presence, rushed to its aid. The door cracked. Edwin’s wild eyes peered out beneath wilder hair. He squinted, surveyed her up and down.

“Mr. Malcolm?” Denise said solemnly.

Edwin always had a good memory for faces, but he was admittedly lost until he heard that voice. It contained a perforated, angelic quality that had only ripened with age. True she was taller, leaner, better dressed and groomed, and more pale, but Edwin knew Denise’s voice. It was difficult to forget: he and most of her peers had become experts at manufacturing excuses for her speak. Its gentleness had been so rarely employed then that its innocence was superbly comforting. It always lulled him into a trance– he and everyone else that heard it.

“D-Denise Collins?” Edwin said, easing the door open. She gave a small nod. “C-Come in. It’s freezing out there!”

Denise thanked him, completely oblivious this was the most lively Edwin had been in years. His changes were soon evident as he rushed back and forth preparing coffee, mindlessly preening the house, and inviting her to sit on a couch. With a cup of coffee before each of them, he set down to speak as lightly as possible. Denise allowed it, for now.

“Tell me everything,” he said, hoping her voice might lull away his pains.

She began with her most recent field of study; the arctic. She and her team had been researching global warming effects on polar ice via extracted core samples. By deducing CO2 content over the various eons, she said, they hoped to better understand just how great an impact humans had made. Edwin was enthralled, both by her discipline and ever-lulling voice. She reached present day and gave a short explanation of what had led her to him.

“I spoke with Melody Parsons. She was in your class with me. I’d heard a new driller was transferred out to help nearby, and that she’d come from my hometown. I met with her and saw it was her. That’s when I heard about your wife.”

Reality smacked Edwin in the face. He was suddenly up, refilling the coffee cups, wiping down the coffee-table, straightening things that didn’t need it. Denise saw the acts for what they were, allowed them until they passed their logical conclusion. It was then that she stood beside him at a kitchen counter. The situation was delicate, required a transference of his madness from one subject to another. She engaged him with a simple question that tempted his natural exposition.

“I heard you working in the garage,” she said carefully. “What is it you’re doing?”

“Hmm?” Then, more dismissively, “Oh that. Nothing. Nothing at all. Just a fever-dream.”

“Really? May I see it?” She asked, knowing she had him by the extensive whiskers.

Denise had never been stupid. In fact, once she’d applied herself and her home-life faded into the background of strife adulthood brought, she’d become an honor-student, a Dean’s-Lister, and an Honor Graduate. She’d been accepted into MENSA, spent time as a researcher at MIT, then formed her own team to study the Arctic Ice. Needless to say, she knew exactly how Edwin would react. Edwin likewise, saw exactly how he’d been manipulated, but for wishing to hear her speak further, allowed it. They stood just inside his garage, Denise stared at a concoction of piping and bits of steel intermingled with gauges and a myriad of other instruments. A sort of cage enclosed a van’s rear-bench seats half-crowded by pipes running around them.

Denise was breath-taken, “What is it?”

“Take a seat,” Edwin said calmly.

They twisted and turned, slipped through the pipes. With a thrown switch, a loud hum grew to a deep grumble. The device thrummed. Something sparked. Light descended in a dome. Denise reached out to touch the field of blue, her hand repelled by a power anti-magnetism.

“A force-field?”

“To protect us… and them.”

He threw another switch: bright light flashed. The pair were suddenly sitting before an open garage door in bright daylight. Denise’s brow furrowed. A car rolled into the drive-way, oblivious to their presence. Its door opened. A duplicate Edwin appeared from one side. He looked as he’d been when Denise knew him. He jogged to the car door and a beautiful young woman there. The Edwin beside Denise teared up, sniffled quietly. His duplicate embraced his wife for a moment before thgey walked, hand-in-hand, out of view.

A second flash replaced the closed door. The blue force-field sank away. All went quiet, still– including the two travelers. When noise finally returned, it was Denise building to amazement.

“Woah.” She swallowed hard, “You built a time machine?”

Edwin sighed, his body deflating with a sad nods. “Every night, for years, I’ve come here to watch them– us– to see her again. Each time the trip’s a little longer, but I can only maintain the connection for short bursts. It’s why I am always working, trying to squeeze even a second longer from the machine to see her come down the road… or anything else.”

Denise’s heart ached, but reality was painful. “Mr. Malcolm, I know it’s harsh, but this isn’t real. It was, but it isn’t now. You can’t effect it. You can’t change what happened. All you’re doing’s lingering, wallowing. These things happened, sure, but they’re supposed to remain inside you, to remind you life is worth living. Not to be the focus of its dwindling time.”

Edwin was quiet for a long time. The look on his face said he’d taken her words to heart. She knew she’d had at least a partial impact. She needed to make it stick though. There was only one avenue she saw to do so.

“You’ve inspired so many lives in your time. You could inspire infinitely more. You’ve done something no-one else can do, and there’s fodder in that to hide the truth if you need, but you have to ask yourself: is this really what she’d want for you?”

His eyes were teary. They rose to meet hers, “I know you’re right.” He hesitated a long time, then, “But I’ve become numb. I don’t know how to go back to what I was.”

She frowned, “You don’t. You change, grow, incorporate it into you. Adapt and evolve.”

“How?”

She managed a small smile, “I owe you a lot. I’ll help. Whatever you need.”

He gave a desperate laugh that mingled with a sob. It incised both of their hearts. “I need sleep.”

“Then go and get it,” Denise insisted. “I’ll be back in the morning to wake you, I promise.”

They climbed from the time machine. Edwin headed into the house. Denise followed. He glanced back at her, “So you’ll be here? Then what?”

She shook her head, “One thing at a time.”

He felt weight lift from his shoulders. Simultaneously, Denise felt some settle on hers. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. After all, she owed him. He’d put her life on track. That friendship was worth the weight and more. Now, she’d just have to show him as much. Then what? Who knows? Maybe life.

Short Story: Immortalized

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 2 Comments

She didn’t know how to say it. Writing it was easier, but speaking it was difficult. A few days ago, she couldn’t have even done that. Thinking of it was still painful, but before– in the first moments following it– even thoughts had failed her. Now, here she sat, staring at the log-in screen of her own computer, in her own gaming chair. Beside her, his empty chair and blank screen inflected a terrible grief on her heart. It choked her up, what needed to be done, but she had to do it.

It was like that old adage of “the show must go on.” Only it wasn’t a show. For her, it was life. Life had to go on. Most people found comfort in that, solace in the idea that it’d one day end. They held vain hopes of reunions. She didn’t. She had only the grim reality of the lonely present. They’d met through a screen, just like the one she watched now. The character had been different then; blue-gray skin in place of the pasty white. Black hair where it was now bright red. The bright palettes of high-level armor had adorned the elf-body though, as it did now. She remembered the first time she ever saw him, in-game. Love at first sight didn’t exist for her. It wasn’t going to either. Through avatars of druid bulls, archer-orks, or anything else the game manifested, it simply couldn’t.

His words, those were real. His actions, by proxy at first, were real too. The twelve years of love, happiness, and marriage since were even more real.

All of it had come from a raid night. she’d been invited to join his guild for the chance of epic loot and hordes of XP, in exchange for healing magic. No-one had any idea what they’d started. Before long, she was up all night with him, playing after the rest of the Guild had retired. She’d always been his support, his crutch. Even after things had gone from game-life to real-life. His upbringing had left him with more emotional baggage, but he managed it with a rogue-like agility that defied the tank-builds he played.

She understood that paradox better than anyone: He’d always thrown himself into the thick of things to save others. The scars on his face and back said so. They were small, subtle, but there. She remembered them as well as the earthen hair and eyes she’d caress and stare into. Most of all, she remembered how he’d gotten them, a story he’d only told once. It was all the times she’d needed.

He’d been quiet, voice softer than a mouse’s. He’d come home from work one night as a teen, later than usual. His father had decided to take out his pink-slip on his sister. He fought back for the first time that night. His sister cowered, bloody and bruised in a corner, as he was beaten almost to death that night. His parents told the paramedics he’d fallen down the stairs. They’d hid the little sister in her room. Everyone knew the lie, but Martin kept quiet for his mother’s sake. The belt marks were too distinct. The scars from the buckle obvious. It had gouged skin like a garden rake to chaff.

A friend of his informed the police soon after. They raced over and caught Martin’s father in the act. As far as she knew, he still hadn’t shown his face. More than two decades had passed. But Martin held no grudges, especially at the end. That he was gone now was unbearable.

She took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and keyed in her password. A prompt flashed for a secondary authentication, and she typed in a pass-code sent to her phone via text. The loading screen with its mini-game about cute elves went untouched. It dissolved to the field where she’d last logged out beside him. They’d played for hours and hours together, expecting an end. Yet somehow, they both knew when it was the last time. They’d returned to the field where they’d first met, where she’d first joined the guild to raid, and stood beside one another to watch the animated landscape.

There was a resignation in Martin then. He just held her hand, in game and out, and stared into the distance. It was as if things had come full circle. Only Martin could say what or how. Even now, her eyes leaked to think of that sad despair in his ailing grip.

She wiped an eye, keyed in a command to pull up the guild-chat menu. All but a couple of the regulars were on. It didn’t surprise her. It was prime farming time. After-work hours were guaranteed to find the full-Guild in voice chat. The couple that weren’t there were still friends. She had to wait. It was only a few minutes before they appeared, almost in tandem. She cleared her throat, wiped away a few more tears, and slipped on her headset. She sent invites to join a party, at her location, to everyone. Another few minutes passed before the twenty-odd people had assembled before her in-game.

Like Martin before, she felt something had come full-circle. She stood in the same field where she and Martin had first met. Where she and everyone had first met. The assembly armored creatures stood in two lines before her, sensing what was to be said. They felt no need to rush her, nor could have for anything in the world.

Her breath shook. Her voice warbled and wobbled. “You are mine and Martin’s best friends. He loved you. As I do. Like f-family.” She involuntarily sucked air through her teeth. It rip the hearts from every guild member. “That is why, I feel it my duty to…”

She sucked air again. No one moved. The avatars merely watched, awaiting the inevitable words. Not even they wished to sully the moment with idly animated movement. It was obvious the group was as heart-sick and grieving as she was.

“I feel it my duty to… tell you Martin’s battle with cancer ended this week.” A near-imperceptible slump of shoulders appeared from the assembled creatures– or the players’ grief was so thick in the air, it felt that way. “He w-wanted me to th-thank you for everything you’ve done. If it were not for your kindness, the last few months would’ve been unbearable. I f-feel the same. You’re the family neither of us has had but wished for. I can only thank you for that, for me and for Martin.”

The field sank once more into silence. It lasted a long moment before a character suddenly materialized from thin air. Judging by the rare, exclusive armor, and the lone markings of “GM” and a single name, it was one of the game’s admins– the big wigs that worked on it, and whose power in this place exceeded a God’s.

He looked to the assembled characters. “Forgive my interruption. I understand this is a time of great pain, but my presence was requested by Mr.Fluffers.” He said as a random guild-member bowed amid the assembly. “You’ve lost a member of your guild. I understand the depth of that bond. So in your friend’s honor, I give you this.”

With a flashing spell-cast, a statue in the place where Martin would have stood beside her– where he had stood, time and time again. Cast in bronze, and identical to his character, his name was inscribed on its base– the ultimate honor any player could ever hope for. The GM turned to eye Martin’s wife and friends.

“I didn’t know him, but seeing his friends– his family– here today, I know he was a good man that kept good company. I am truly sorry for your loss. I dedicate this field in his honor, to be known as Martin’s field. It cannot remove your loss, but it can assure you he will be forever remembered.”

With that, the GM knelt, and placed a glowing, golden flower at the base of Martin’s statue. The rest shuffled over to do the same. She cried openly on the voice chat, more from gratitude than grief. She knew some bonds could not be broken. Death only made them stronger. But so too, it seemed, some people transcended death itself. Their spirit was so powerful a force as to become immortalized in ways man could never have imagined. For her part, she was just glad to have known him. To have loved him. Even if their time together was shorter than she’d have liked.

Poetry-Thing Thursday: We’ve Had Words

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

We’ve had words,
most of which will never be remembered.
Ran with different herds,
that nonetheless vanished late September.

But all the same,
I felt sadness, isolation,
when your name,
appeared for death’s orientation.

Though I feel very little,
these days for those of the past,
I’ve never found acquittal,
for broken hearts at flags half-mast.

It was a lifetime ago,
for you especially now,
that I watched your storm blow,
but now you’ve taken your bow.

The lights have dimmed.
The stage is gone.
Your mascara thinned,
all now over yon.

Out of time and space and life,
a fire dimmed forever, ne’er to be bright,
but to also never feel strife,
nor fade without a fight.

Strangers, perhaps we were,
but I feel you’d say otherwise.
Even if I were a blur,
you’d never allow for lies.

So now we say goodbye.
Forevermore do we part,
and with a lone, final sigh,
I lock you away in my heart.

Short Story: I Remember…

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I remember the ships that hovered over our world in conquest. I remember it as if it had only just happened. Though it was decades ago now, nothing is so vivid in my mind. They came from the sky on glowing trails, like someone had hurled fire-bombs at us. An apt comparison given what came later. The only difference? They never hit the ground. They never had to. They came to a rest, searing heat and all, just above the tops of the tallest buildings.

I remember sitting on the couch, then later, standing in the streets, seeing the giant television in then times-square that revealed we’d been beaten, or rather surrendered– the beatings came later. I can’t remember those. I don’t want to. What I do remember was wandering, guided by my mother’s hand, through New York’s chaotic streets. I’d never known the scent of fear– real, pure, human terror– until then. It was palpable on the tongue, stank like the homeless did, like we all do now.

My mother… she had a gentleness that died with her, as if the world took such a soft creature to protect her from the wrath her child’s generation would bear. Even now, I remain glad that the madness of those first days claimed her. Though I was terrified and alone for a long while, I knew even then it was safer to be dead than subject to the horrors to come.

The first mistake we made as a civilization was existing. That was all it had taken to bring them from the skies over Alpha Centauri, have their forces launched across the openness of space to our backyard. Before the tele-streams and internet died for good, someone had calculated that they’d left their home system for Earth sometime around the broadcasts of Kennedy’s election, hadn’t arrived until the late 2010’s. It led to our second mistake.

I remembered being eight years old…. Christ, it feels like a life-time ago now. Maybe it was. Eight years old, with a gun shoved into my hands. It was a nine millimeter, fifteen round magazine with a thumb safety, and heavy. I remember that much. With that tool came the first beatings from my own kind, to instill in me how to hold it, aim it, kill with it. All because some armchair-genius had calculated the invaders expected our technology to be stuck in the sixties. What a fool.

It was only later that we learned, collectively, that our technological prowess would have never matched theirs. Not in a million years. They didn’t have to speak, or scream, or fire weapons. They simply arrived and the planet was already conquered. When we took up arms in resistance against our governments’ fealty, we spent immeasurable amounts of ammunition trying to kill them. They took full magazines from whole battalions of armed militias, their bodies riddled with holes, but bled not a single drop of fluid from their leathery hides. They were modern-day Khans, each of them, but even his conquest paled in comparison to theirs.

Their tactic was simple. To remember it now almost makes me laugh, but I can’t. I haven’t known joy or laughter, or anything more than fear for decades. I doubt there’s a human that has. As it was explained by a former-scientist just before his untimely execution, these humanoid creatures have some type of reinforced cartilage across their bodies– like the stuff our noses and joints are made of, but so strong it can withstand the force of bullets. They were walking kevlar, and because of their gel-like skeletons and regenerative abilities, nothing short of a nuclear weapon could stop them. Believe me, we tried them all; grenades, bombs, TNT, nothing worked. We learned that the hard way. Every one of them is like a walking terminator. Every. Single. One. Like those terrifying machines, they have only a goal to achieve– whatever it is– and they eliminate anything in the way of it.

Evidently, Humanity’s a part of that goal, because I remember the day their darkest weapon was revealed. As if compelled to by my own muscles, my body, fraught with the peril a rat faces in a sewer– and stinking like one at that– I encountered one of these invaders.

I was in an alley, running for my life after my militia detachment suddenly fell to the ground, began to seize, writhe, foam at the mouths. A few others and I managed to escape, but were split up. I had learned long ago not to scream nor draw attention. Even so, one of them must have sensed me, pursued me. It cornered me in an alley.

They don’t so much walk as float. Though they have two legs, it seems they’re useless. Their arms work though. I’ve seen it, felt it. They drift, lame, wherever they go. Queer-looking face tentacles take the place of mouths above three-fingered, malformed-hands with claws attached to arms longer than their legs. They make a god-awful sound– like someone’s ground metal against a cheese grater in your ear. It’s paralyzing. Both from fear and an auditory pain that seizes your muscles. It’s not even their greatest weapon– the one they conquered us with, or that I saw that night with my own eyes.

I remember sometimes doing things, even at a young age, and not remembering why I’d begun to do them or how. It was as if I simply materialized into the middle of an action, forgot everything about it. They have this way of doing that to you; making you freeze, drop your weapon, lie. For years, we thought we were gaining ground on them, and had received numerous reports about their deaths. We’d heard the war-stories of units that felled them in battle, and even I suspected the scientist’s words had been erroneous, that they could be killed.

How wrong I was. How wrong we all were.

They were lies; every story, every battle scar, ever supposed death of an invader. They’d fabricated the memories in the militia’s minds, used them as walking surveillance drones. They kept mental links through some kind of ESP, allowed them to spread their stories through the militias. Those stories flared into hope for victory, spread like wild-fires around the world. My best friend, the only person I trusted, was one of their plants. What she and I shared… it was the closest thing to joy left in the world. Even still, we could never smile. All of it was lies.

It’s been decades since they first came, and now all hope is lost. We know now what happened, even though we can’t remember how, or why we missed it. I remember hearing from a medic after a patrol that a person will sometimes forget the moments before and after a traumatic experience, sometimes including the trauma itself. It just sort of gets buried in your mind, so impossible to cope with you literally can’t. You fabricate things to put in its place, or else lose time altogether. It has something to do with an electrical overload in the brain that doesn’t allow memories to consciously form.

All I know is what happened after the raids. As if in a flash, we went from believing we might one day win, to knowing there was never been a fight to begin with. They simply appeared– walked in the front door as it were, and we were disarmed. Not a single one of us took up our weapons to fight. We couldn’t. We’d been brain-hacked, mind-controlled not to.

Now, I stand jam-packed with three-hundred other humans in a cage no bigger than a dozen feet squared, like cattle on a killing-floor. I don’t know where we are, or where we’re going, but I remember how we got here. I remember smiling and joy and happiness that once made days of sadness and sorrow worthwhile. But now all I know is despair and the sickly putrescence of two-hundred-odd other bodies smothering me. I forget my name, my friends’ names, even my home. But somehow, I remember my mother’s gentleness. I miss her. I miss the warmth of summer sun, and of childhood– what little of it I had– and the taste of fresh-water. I remember all of the good that came before the bad, something I cannot forget despite the doom we all face.

Maybe one day there will be hope again. Maybe not. All I know is that I remember it….