Lincoln

 

She hadn’t stopped screaming. She couldn’t. Even when her throat was raw and she couldn’t make a sound, she continued to scream, silently with her face distorted into a Gothic portrait of sheer pain and horror.

Her mouth was always dropped up, her cheeks pulled tight like white sheets draped down over a statue. She was always shrieking, always sobbing with wild, wide eyes like broken windows.

All I could do was sit in silence with my back against the cool tiled wall watching the body decay in front of our eyes. I didn’t know where to take her. All I wanted was for to be safe so I had carried her down the long, winding spiral staircase to the basement and placed her between the boxes of instruments.

“She should be in her bed,” said Norma.

“No, she should be with me while I work.”

“How can you work? How…”

“It’s…. It’s all I can do.”

But I couldn’t work. No matter what I had planned, all I wanted was to bring her back but I couldn’t. What was left of her couldn’t be brought back. She would no longer be the queen I held at night.

“We need to tell someone,” said Norma.

Tears and snot were dripping down her gaunt face. Etta’s blood was covering her sweater, growing dark and dry.

“Tell who exactly?”

I thought of the old man in that shack with his secrets, of his son and the man, Pinstripe who he took me to. I thought about the police back home, even of the government. Who  could I trust?

Then I thought about the man in the desert with his own voice screaming with grief. His end would come but right now, right now I couldn’t move an inch.

I watched Etta’s body for so long it became this abstract shape in front of me. Just blood, just a body, just pain and dead love. I thought that I could stare at it for so long that eventually my love for her would reach out my eyes and bring her to life.

Norma, meanwhile, lay down beside her, paralyzed by misery. She hadn’t even asked me what had happened to her or where I found her. She couldn’t. Just like me, no matter what she heard, it didn’t matter. Etta was gone and no explanation could ever bring her back.

“Just tell someone,” she whimpered with her head on Etta’s chest.

Her body was beginning to become misshapen as nature took its course and used it up for its own processes. Her ribcage seemed to sag below Norma’s weight. There was no breath to hold it up anymore.

“Norma, it’s just us now.”

She lifted her head slightly and looked at me through the mass of Etta’s hair.

“There… there must be…

“There’s not.”

She lowered her head back down, tangling her fingers in Etta’s hair as she stroked it. I watched as a clump came away in her hand and she looked at it for a long while as though she didn’t know what to do with it. Then I watched in horror as she tried to press it back onto her head.

“I need a drink and so do you.”

It was too much watching her suffer like this. It was too much feeling this way and the longer I left it, the longer we went without her. Delving into a box, I pulled out a sheet, pushed Norma away and covered Etta’s body.

“You can go to sleep now,” I said although I wasn’t too sure why. “We’ll leave you alone now.”

Norma clung to me as we ascended the stairs, always looking over her shoulder at the body beneath the sheet.

“We can fix this,” I said.

“Now we can’t.”

“I can fix anything.”

I truly meant it although at the back of my mind I had no idea how I could even begin. Upstairs, we sat down at the kitchen table with the sound of the clock ticking softly in the background. I watched the hands move. For the first time, it dawned on me that time moves on no matter how much you suffer. It stops for you but no one else. The world keeps turning, although it’ll never turn the same way for you again.

“I… I don’t know how to…”

Norma was holding a bottle of rum in her hand, shaking so much that most of the contents were spilling across the table. I relieved her of it and poured two glasses.

“You need to eat something.”

“No. How can I?”

“Please.”

She shook her head and drank half her glass. It did nothing to calm her down. Instead, she held it down for a moment, looking off into the distance as though she was remembering something before heaving. She vomited across the table with nothing but wateryrum spilling out from her mouth.

“Stay here,” I said.

She began crying again.

Walking back downstairs, I stepped around Etta’s body, still looking at it while I opened up a drawer and pulled out a vial of tablets. I bent down and kissed the top of her head through the sheet before leaving her alone once again.

“I still love you,” I said and held down the urge to cry.

Once I started, there would be no stopping the floor of tears.

Back upstairs, I opened the vial and dropped five valium pills into Norma’s hand.

“Take all of them,” I said. “You need to sleep.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

She looked at them nodded, swallowing all of them down dry.

A moment later she was slumping down into her seat and I was lying her down on the cold, tiled floor. She was silent at last.

And now my work was to begin.