c. 2003 · Short story — a deathbed, and the women around it.
Death came slowly for the young man who lay against the perpendicular walls that formed the corner of the room. His eyes were open, as they always were. Even in sleep, his eyes were never totally shut. His breath was extremely shallow, and what blood remained in his veins gave what life it could to his dying brain—the source of so much genius, so much creativity, insight, and vision.
His mouth stirred—the smallest movement—but the women in the room could hear the chilling laugh that emitted from within. It was gravelly and wet, a hoarse gurgling, but nothing the women didn’t expect, considering what they had done to the man. The source of the dying man’s humor originated from the ironic fact that the heart and the mind were inseparable, without one the other could not live, and how he had striven to maintain balance for both, abstractly and physically, and how ultimately, abstractly and physically, it had brought him to his doom.
Love and life… Will and wit… The pen is mightier than the sword, and to follow your heart is to find true happiness… Well, someone took that pen and shoved it through my heart, damn it… It’d been this way since the beginning! Why had he had to endure a life that beset him with such terrible obstacles and events, to overcome one only to be plagued by another, and to maintain a life with such a pattern until his death? He recalled the poem Eldorado, written by Edgar Allen Poe, whom the dying man had always admired. Ride, boldly ride indeed…
His vision had already begun to fail. Everything he looked at seemed veiled by a translucent, almost milky, grayness. To think the last things I will see are the women I had loved…do love. Is not love blind? How quaint it all seemed to him. There they were, just standing there watching him. He’d always wanted their attention, but never like this. He had written a poem in his youth…he’d called it “Mortal Love,” and the last stanza went: “When my love leaves, she takes a piece of my heart. I have one last piece, and give it to you. Please don’t leave, I beg you, don’t.” And thus he had somehow gone on to give his next love another last piece, until there were twenty or so last pieces of his heart being carried around by lost loves… Oh damn, he’d never asked them to give those pieces back! Were his eyes closing? Were they really closing?
The women watched silently as his breathing stopped…looked at his dead face, with eyes that were shut against the world that had dealt him a hand that couldn’t win. Then, each of the women, who had never felt a tear for the man they had each in their own way betrayed, suddenly felt a heart-gripping blanket of grief come falling upon them. What had they done? What had they done!? To join that good man in his eternal sleep would be the only answer, but would he turn them away, just as they had him? If so, then it was only as they deserved. And one by one, they died, just like him; only their eyes remained open, staring at the man who refused to look back, finally.
Composed 2003 · part of the Short Stories collection · authorship documented on the Provenance page.