Death, A Commentary

Audience to a Murder

Chop. Chop. Chop!

The boy, not more than 19, stands in a clearing in the dark woods. Tall black cedars and pines surround him like ghouls at a funeral, each a witness to his destruction, his ax a scythe, dismembering the already mutilated bodies of the trees’ brethren. Their groans echo throughout the assembly, and a light wind rustles their branches. But the trees’ shivers at the boy’s horror go unnoticed by him, and he continues chopping and separating the limbs, then carefully shaving them into planks and chiseling into them notches and grooves. 

A cricket chirps, the sparse grass trembles, and the moon glares down in an otherwise dark night. On and on the boy works, deep in the darkness, a solitary and brutal knight determined to fulfill his task, unaware of the many onlookers who judge and who cry. 

He fits the grooves of the planks together, then pounds nails deep into the flesh to secure them together. Bloody chips of marrow fly like sparks as his strong hands and thick forearms brace his victim and swing his punisher up and down, cooly assaulting the nail. Crack. Crack. 

A square base is constructed, then a tall tower of stiff wood. On this structure and  supported by a diagonal clamp of wood is a perpendicular beam, at the end of which is fastened a thick and twisted rope. The boy hefts this onto his shoulder and drags it until he can position it on the notches he has carved into the wooden base, at which point the two structures slide together like a foot into a shoe.

He stares at his creation, in shock at what he has created. A frankenstein stares back, angry and shameful at his existence. The two monsters stiffly stand, eye to eye, trapped in a standoff and awaiting the execution. They do not know it, but they are the spectacle in an arena, gladiators surrounded by thousands of terrified and anxious onlookers. 

She is one of those audience members, has always been, from the moment she entered this realm seven years ago. From up here she sees everything, but she cannot impact the events that play out, only laugh and cry and weep and pray. The path her grandson embarks upon she cannot alter, though she may try. She yells at him to try returning to the broken home he left not long ago, she entreats him to open himself up once more to the friends he feels have rejected him, she pleads at him to seek friendship in the embrace of his friend Daniella whom he cast off in years past, and she watches in stark horror as he creates with such care and precision this monstrosity, this abomination, this diabolical tool which can steal his life through the perverted subjugation of the trees and the earth around him.  

Solemnly and with care, the boy takes out a stool and sets it under his contraption. His young legs effortlessly lift his bulk onto it, and his wrinkleless face rises to the height of the dark and twisted rope, itself sinews of the surrounding nature. His calloused and muscular hands delicately clasp the cord, and he slowly fits it around his youthful head. 

Pushed here by suffering, pushed here by pain, pushed here by the perceived rejection of the world, he can no longer accept himself. Life has become a mire of disappointment and a bombardment of regret. Each second he lives, the weight of all those faces bear down on him like Sysiphus’s stone, crushing him under a weight he can no longer see the purpose of trying to bear. His life feels like a bath in shards of glass, thousands of jagged daggers stabbing into his heart alongside the sword he has recently placed there himself. His blood fills the tub, drowning him in a fitful wave of inadequacy and powerlessness. The air leaves his lungs, is replaced by the seething army of glass and bodily oil, and his pulse disappears. 

As the trees wail and his grandma cries in agony, the boy leaps into the air and kicks the stool out from under him in one fluid motion. The moon stares as his body plummets to the earth, the noose constricts around his neck, and his life dissolves into the night, his corpse now one final limb added to the frankenstein which haunts the darkness.   

At the Edge of Dawn

The woman looks like a clown. Brightly colored pants and shirt, gloved hands, red face. She certainly feels like one, a clown in a circus, her movements shameful and pathetic, her being not worthy of respect. How could this happen? How could she have done this? How could this happen again?! What even is the point of being a nurse if she can’t help anyone! Her leg bounces on the concrete step. Like her mind, her eyes unleash torrents of anguish. A light breeze brushes her hair into her face. 

   —       

She checks his vitals, takes his temperature, feels his cheek. He’s cold, much more than he was last time. And he’s dry, a strange parchedness like she’s touching a desert plant’s leaf, yet she knows if she were to press firmer she would experience a moistness like the meat of a cactus. She can’t do that though, can’t risk feeling the life still smoking inside him–he’s already so weak. 

He whispers something to her, a rasp against the tunnel of his mouth, but she can’t hope to understand. She nods anyway, wanting him to feel content if this is indeed his last hour or day. Yesterday, he called her his wife. He told her to stay and not leave him, and it tore her heart as she broke away to check on her other patients. Little did she know those would be some of his last words. Any others are lost to the void of indifference. 

His family isn’t here, they never were. eight years ago, they dropped him off at the retirement center and haven’t been seen since. Their only remaining connection to this man, presumably their father or grandfather, is the money they keep flowing into the assisted living company’s accounts. Like some sort of reverse bail, their blood money ensures their relative stays imprisoned and out of their lives. 

Not that he remembers them anymore. Several years into his sentence he developed dementia, four years later he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and in the past two years his condition has progressed into a steadily worsening psychosis. Every once in a while, pockets of his old self reappear, flinging themselves out of the mummified remains of his corrupted mind. They are beautiful, intense but brief windows into the strong and intelligent man this husk of a person used to be, rays of light catapulted from the depths of a pure soul surrounded by a black cocoon. 

The woman often can’t contain herself at these moments. The beauty of this person, the decrepit state of his condition, the cruelty and callousness of his family, the fact he’s not a day older than 65, all of it will combine and overwhelm her like a wave, forcing her to run to the bathroom where she’ll drain her drowning soul in the embrace of the sink. He’s too young. It’s so unfair. Why do such awful things happen to such innocent people?!

She knows the cancer will kill him soon, even though she’s tried everything within her power to stop it. Benign at first, it attacked in savage bursts, slowly conquering and poisoning the man’s organs. Now, with each labored breath his stomach rises and falls in an unnatural contortion of working and dead parts like the pieces of a Whac-a-mole at a carnival. 

She should have seen the signs of the cancer earlier, the pain when he ate, the slight limp when he walked, but she just attributed those maladies to his disrupted mental state. She should have had the courage to ask him about these things, even if they were nothing. Why didn’t she at least take him to a doctor’s office to get them checked out? How could she have failed so miserably at her job. If only the cancer had been discovered earlier, her patient might be recovering instead of dying.

Then, as she’s measuring out medications in another room. She hears it. A long, high pitched beep which doesn’t falter. 

The man is dead.

In a haze she calls the paramedics, takes out his IV, goes in and organizes his stuff into a square brown box like he’s simply changing jobs. The body is rolled by on a stretcher, loaded into an ambulance and sent to the morgue. The paramedics ask her when he passed, what his last blood readings were, who in his family to call. The procedures are practical, mundane, rehearsed, routine, even casual. 

All of a sudden she snaps back into life, is hit with the reality of death, can barely stand. After quickly calling for her assistant to take over, she races outside into the breezy afternoon air and collapses onto the cold gray steps. 

—

Her mother hugs her, cries with her daughter over the death of a man she too has grown close to over the past eight years. She knows his pain, she knows how pancreatic cancer takes over, how each morning you wake up wondering what else is amiss, wondering what action will bring newfound pain and discomfort. She also knows how this man felt in his last moments, how loved her daughter has made him feel by caring for him and listening to him, as was done for her. 

Despite what her daughter thinks, the man was never alone. As he spoke his last words, she sat there listening, crying as he croaked, in a barely audible voice, ”Oh to be loved.” As he wheezed his last breaths, she cradled his head, and when she saw his spirit detach from his body she guided it up into the abyss. 

The Wicked and the Wasted

Alone and suffocated by four dark wooden walls, a man cries in agony. His house is a prison, small and primitive with one door and no windows. On the roof is a broken lantern and in the bookshelves are only moldy books. People used to come here, people used to visit and make merry, used to laugh and gossip. Not anymore. Everyone has come to realize who this man is. Everyone has come to realize what he has done.

Now, nothing stirs in this place. No mice climb the rafters, no beetles dig into the wood, no cockroaches dine in the cupboards. All is quiet and all is dead. Not even a cricket chirps in the eternal night, for this is a dark place, a sad place. The shadows never leave, and color left this grave long ago.

Only a demented man remains, clothed in the decaying rags of a tuxedo which mirror his crippling sadness and despair. His mangled hair hangs in tangled tufts and strands, and his limbs fall about themselves in a forlorn frigidness. His eyes have become cesspools of tears, pits of mushy darkness, and his eyelashes are all but eroded by the constant moisture. In this eerie darkness, his skin reflects a lucid white from a light-source far away and impossible to reach. 

Far off in that direction, there is color, but over here, in this despicable and dank corner, it has lost all purpose. If he were to stand, to brush away his dust, to open his door and search for the light, it would be like running after the sun, utterly futile and debilitatingly frustrating. No, this man cannot reach that source, nor can he find the color, for his chains he constructed in a previous dimension, intricately forged in time and enthusiastically inlaid with diamond.

He is a hopeless soul, the dregs of the coffee and the grime of the city. And in this rancidness he must remain, for the crimes of a place far removed but ever present in his view. Now, in this cave of sorrow and pain, in this pit of acid and infection, in this mansion of misery and feast of poison, now he can only watch.   

—

A man rounds a corner, eyes blazing and heart pounding. In his hand he clutches a Colt revolver, an ancient handgun with one barrel and a six-holed rotating cylinder, cocked and loaded. In his vengeful determination, his hair has become slick with sweat and his body inebriated with adrenaline, like a liquid fire coursing through his molten muscles. It destroys him, hobbles him, mutilates him, and yet right now he doesn’t care. He’s willing to die, so long as he’s not the only one leaving this earth. 

An image of his three-year-old grandson shoots through his mind and his fury increases tenfold. He had such cute monkey ears, a nose that sniffed like a rabbit, and eyes that seemed to say “are you sure I can’t have that piece of chocolate?”. The man remembers how his little limbs used to bob up and down whenever they played the soundtrack to Mama Mia, how he used to laugh when his daddy made faces, how he smiled whenever he let out a little fart. 

Now the man is a demon, his decrepit body barely able to sustain the nuclear energy flowing through every inch of his blood. His legs gallope up a flight of stairs, his hands latch onto and bite railings as his arms hurl his body forward like the water plummeting over a series of rocks. Every sense is heightened to its max, every muscle working at full capacity. He hears a lady bartering for food to his right, a man arguing with his son to his left. 

He knocks someone out of his way, shoves through a small crowd of people, snarls at a dog that gets in his way. In his mind, he knows exactly where he’s going. He’s lived in this neighborhood his entire life and has seen the house a million times. Only recently did it start to be occupied by druggies and gangsters, people who prey on the lives of others in order to survive themselves. They are heartless, cruel, desperate, afraid people, and willing to kill at any cost to protect themselves. 

Three blocks away. Two blocks. One block. The man rockets through an alley, up an embankment, and all of a sudden he’s there, bloody and bruised at the steps of that damned house, face inches away from the wood plank door, hand hovering in hungry anticipation. Up above, the clouds pace in a frenetic dance of fear.

Another memory flashes through his head, this time of his little baby clutched in the arms of his daughter, the mother’s embrace like a tortilla around beans, keeping the little bundle of energy safe and protected. But now that little boy is playing with a bouncy ball, is dropping it and picking it up. It careens out the door and onto the concrete street, where the oblivious toddler gleefully chases after it. As the man watches from windows inside the house, police round the corner, then armed men with ski masks and rifles appear from an alley. They notice the officers and quickly draw their weapons. The little boy looks up in confusion, a little red ball clutched in his sausage fingers. As the officers duck out of the way, a thunderstorm erupts, a stray bullet bounces off a wall and the skull of a baby not privy to the evil contained within this world explodes with an awful crack. His little body crumples to the ground, red liquid erupting from his splattered brains.   

This image sears madly into the old man’s brain, and he is ripped back into reality. At once savagely lucid, he charges in a rage through the feeble door in front of him, splintering it into a million pieces. His eyes notice a man in a balaclava reaching for his weapon in the hallway, not more than fifteen feet away, eyes wide and in shock at the intrusion. The old man raises the revolver, points the barrel directly at his black wool target, tenses his index finger and fires–three shots, three fatal blows, three lead torpedos which slide through the man’s brain and explode on the concrete wall behind him. 

The body is punched backward, the weapon flung from its hands, the blood flung from the cavities in a gruesome display around the flattened bullets. The mission is completed, the revenge undertaken, the justice dolled out.

And yet, in a lonely and forgotten hut in a place very close at hand, an old man whimpers in distress at the horror he has just witnessed, at the perverseness of that world. His eyes try to close, but they can’t. They are stitched open, forced to understand the relentlessness of death and the cruelty of his creation, forever witness to the foulness of ambition. 

Next to him, contained within a glassy case and enthroned on a stand, a short pipe of clouded metal and glued wood with the monogram “SC” crumbles into ash.