Subject: screaming silently in vain
From: olemak@origo.telenor.no (Ole Martin Kristiansen)
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 16:41:31 +0100

the shrapnel, a twisted piece of an old wroughtiron staircase stuck out of
her back, protruding like an obnoxious ten-year-olds middle finger, a
symbolic poke in the eye. he had to swallow hard to keep the bile down,
gasping for air. she convulsed a couple of time and then went still, on
top of him. he could not move, there was something wrong with his legs.
her weight pressed him down, crubling his lungs like sheets of paper
headed for a trashbin.

he was having trouble remembering how he got here. he was walking up the
stairs, she followed after him, then a sound. they turned around, ten a
flash of light and a roar. now he was laying in a pile of rubble, her dead
weight pinning him down. he had blood in his eyes, he could not see.

he woke up again, not remembering much at first, but it gradually came
back to him. policemen questioned him. they told him who the woman had
been. they used to be married. he used to love her. now she was dead. he
could not remember her, but he belived that he loved her. he could feel a
loss, and he connected it to her, to the picture of her he kept on his
nightstand, a fading polaroid.

the photo became his link to the past, to all the things he used to have.
A beautiful woman he possibly loved, and who possibly loved him back. a
body that worked. friends. work. a future and a past. now he had neither.
he mourned his loss with relentless abandon.

the doctors and the insurance company said everything would be fine. they
gave him medicine. they put their knives in him and pried him open, but
there was'nt much left inside him to look at. they gave him a new spine,
because the old one was broken. small machines were at work inside him,
mending him, as if he was an anthill somebody had run over with a car. the
worker ants and the drones and even the soldiers were all busy
reconstructing, but the queen was dead.

numbly, he accepted his physical rehabilitation. he was now financially
secured, her life insurance had taken care of that, and his body was
mended, a modern marvel of medical technology. his mind, however, lingered
in the limbo of his now erased previous life.

all the sadness in the world seeped into him, he was a crack in the
concrete floor of a room filled to the ceiling with fluid sadness. his
whole exisistence was devoted to mourning her, a woman he could not
remember. in this way, she did not die, and he did not live. she continued
to haunt the land of the living, and he was her medium. he became her
ghost.