The Lost Soul
991 words Flash fiction. Under 2xA4 pages. Quick read.
It was the predawn grey of early morning. The world was still fast asleep. The dull whisper of muffled night sounds washed over and around Carrie, without her noticing. She walked in a daze, her face and eyes awash with tears, and her throat burning with a scratching fire. As she stumbled towards the graveyard gates, pain slashed and ripped at her heart. Carrie cried out loud in her agony, long racking sobs tearing from her belly.
Carrying a small bundle of his clothes under her arm and a disc of his favourite music, somehow on a CD, she looked at her shaking hands. It made no sense! In a rage born of pain, she snapped the CD into halves and twisted them as if they were liquid mercury until they were mangled beyond recognition; but they were his, so she could not throw them aside. Despair was a great rock in her heart.
Getting herself moving, Carrie went through the black wrought-iron gates, into the graveyard, and trudged over to where he lay. Darkness encompassed her with an unfriendly chill, pushing the approaching morning back in time. It was pitch dark now. Carrie was oblivious to the caress of the crypt-cold wind against her cheek and in her hair. With icy fingers, she reached over and lovingly stroked his headstone, and with blue lips, she tenderly kissed the photograph of him mounted there. Carrie then ritually piled the bundle of his clothes and his now somehow shattered CD onto the grave and set fire to them.
Staring blankly through the flames for long moments, with the weight of leaden agony crushing her, she turned and made her slow way out into the streets of darkened silence, her floor-length white nightgown whispering along the ground around her frozen bare feet.
As she trudged along the deserted road, Carrie gradually became aware of a clock clenched tightly in her cold hands. It was nondescript and dull, an old-fashioned alarm clock with two alarm bells and four tiny legs, the glass missing from its face. Not fully aware of what she was doing, Carrie began to turn back the hours. Back, and back, and back, to the last night he was alive. As she reached the last evening he was in the hospital, Carrie realised that this time she must go and see him to say goodbye, before he was gone from her forever.
She stopped turning the hands on the clock, and the alarm went off, ringing with abnormally loud echoes which bounced around through the otherwise silent night. Carrie dropped the clock, without looking at it, and it grew tiny wings and flew out of her hands as she ran desperately toward the hospital.
Time-shifted and pivoted, subtly altering around her but Carrie was only aware of the wretched need in her to see him, and she ran and ran through the muffled time matrix. Reaching the hospital door, she was overcome with desperation.
“What time is it?” she demanded frantically.
Smiling gently, the nurse replied, “It is visiting time,” and opened the door to his ward for her. And Carrie could see him! There! In his bed! Laughing and chatting with his visitors, his face full of sparkle even to the last.
A monumental lump swelled in Carrie’s throat, and fresh tears swamped her swollen face. Hesitant, she walked toward his bed, ignoring all of his callers as they faded out of existence. Her eyes filling with the sight of him, Carrie reached down and picked up his hands. He saw her pain-ravaged features and a look of concern crossed his face.
“I told you not to come,” he chided gently.
“And I didn’t come,” she replied. “I’m so sorry. I was afraid.”
He looked at her with compassion, and under his gentle and knowing gaze she blurted out, “Please, don’t do this.” She grabbed at him, fingers desperate claws of steel, begging.
Softly he replied, “This already is, and so, it must be.”
She shouted, and sobbed, and her words bounced between them, and, in the growing quiet of their ricochet, her eyes dulled.
“Some things must not be changed. You know it.”
She saw she had lost. It would still be.
“Goodbye, my darling. I love you.” Her voice was a harsh whisper, and her head hung dejectedly.
Without knowing she had moved, Carrie was in the stairwell to the hospital, sitting on a step against the wall, in a curled-up ball. Razing agony consumed her mercilessly. Absentminded, she noticed the old cream plastic, digital alarm clock on the stairs next to her, and picked it up. As she turned to look for an electrical point so that she could plug it in, a piece of plaster cracked out of the wall and fell to the floor, revealing a plug socket next to her foot. Carrie pushed the remains of the disintegrating plaster clear and plugged in the clock. Dull red electronic digits swung backwards and forwards on the screen at random, but she did not care. They stopped at a time, some time, she didn’t know when, and the alarm went off, jerking the clock from her hands, ringing into disappearance in the murk now swirling around her. Carrie saw time shifting as the staircase became something else. She rose, the desolation within her matching her surroundings as she walked out into the eternal night.
The street was deserted, and Carrie now felt the cold. Tugging on the white cardigan which appeared in her hands, did not warm the death in Carrie’s heart. She did not know when she was. She did not care. With shoulders slumped in defeat, she walked away into the night, howling out a long wailing cry filled with anguish.
In real-time, Carrie’s friends were startled to hear a strange keening cry but paused only for a second, shrugged and continued with what they were doing as the wail faded into oblivion.
© CATHERINE KNEE 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED