Pain, Roberto A Robles [best classic novels txt] 📗

mean!” he said, raising his voice and quickly turning to look at the kitchen door. Lowering his voice once more, he said, “Mom’s got this false idea that dad will recover. He won’t!”
“I’m not stupid,” Ginny said. “I know the odds as well as you do, but stranger things have happened. If mom wants to hold on to a little hope, to believe… what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s wrong!”
“Why?” Ginny turned to look at her brother.
“Because she’ll be hurt!”
“Oh, and you think she won’t be hurt, anyway?”
“It’s not the same,” Trenton said standing up and walking to her sister.
Ginny turned around to check on the broth, asking, “How is it different, Trenton? Explain to me because I’m failing to see what you, in your infinite wisdom, must already know.”
“Oh, shut up!” Trenton spat out. “Why do you always have to trot out the same shit?”
“Why do you always have to put everyone down?” asked his sister. “Why do you always have to be the one who owns the truth? Huh? The one to point it out to us, mental cripples, as if we couldn’t see what’s happening, just like you? Better than you!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Trenton finally raised his voice.
“What the fuck are you talking about? False hope,” Ginny raised her voice in turn, “why false? What do you know?”
“You always do the same shit,” he said taking a step towards his sister, “what’s next? Your moronic insults? Huh?”
“Get away,” Ginny said, “leave me alone. You act like a moron and then you demand that people follow your orders. Who do you think you are?”
Maybe it was the revulsion in her voice ordering him away as if he were the carrier of a deadly infection. Maybe all that pent up rage after months of struggling with so much misery just swelled up inside him and had to come out. For whatever reason, Trenton went in for the kill, “I act like a moron?” he shouted. “That’s rich, little slut!”
Ginny’s hands found themselves wrapped around the handle of the pot heating the soup, and although her eyes marked the white knuckles in her hands, her brain didn’t make sense of what the hands it commanded were doing.
“That’s just rich!” Trenton continued, not knowing he had less than thirty seconds to live. “I wasn’t the one who put out like a whore!”
Ginny’s hands lifted the pot from the stove. It was hot and it was heavy, but even though nervous endings on her fingers and palms cried out to her spinal cord, which rerouted the message to her brain in a millionth of a second, even though her brain responded to that alarm by ordering her hands to put the scolding pot back down before her hands were heavily damaged, even though this also happened in a millionth of a second, Ginny’s arms failed to respond.
“I didn’t spread my legs for some moron with a car! Not when my father was dying and he didn’t need shit like th..”
Ginny turned around, using the turn to build momentum, and the hot pot of soup in her disobedient hands connected with Trenton’s head with a sickening thud, just as he was turning his back to Ginny, still spewing invective at his sister.
With the back of his head caved in, he was dead before his body hit the ground.

Marion Dobbs had woken her husband up when she put her hand to his forehead, as if looking for a fever.
“Mmhh?” he moaned.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I thought you were awake.”
“ ’s okay,” he managed to say.
“Do you want a little more soup?” she asked. “You seemed a little better this evening when you ate.”
“No.”
Mrs. Dobbs heard shouts in the kitchen, then. “What now?” she asked aloud. “Let me see what’s going on and I’ll come back with some soup, honey. Okay?”
“Sleep,” Mr. Dobbs begged.
“Are you sure?” she asked, disappointed. “It’s no trouble, really….”
“No” Mr. Dobbs said, “...soup. Pain.”
“Honey,” Mrs. Dobbs looked at the alarm clock on her night table. “I can’t give you another shot for an hour yet. I’m sorry.”
“Why…” Mr. Dobbs sighed, “…wake me?”
“I’m… sorry…” she said, finally realizing her insistence had brought him back to the ceaseless pain from whatever place it was he went to blanket it. “Oh, Jackson, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Dobbs as she heard something fall in the kitchen.
“Oh, my God,” she turned around and made for the door.
Mr. Dobbs now aware that something was going on downstairs said to his wife, “Go… check.”
It was Ginny she was thinking of as she climbed down the stairs. Ginny falling on the kitchen floor. Maybe she had slipped, that floor could be slippery and treacherous. But Trenton would have called out! Why isn’t Trenton calling out? He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t want to wake his father. He wouldn’t want to scare her, either. He must be taking care of the situation. He must be helping her up. That’s when she heard another thud and Ginny cried out. “I’m coming, baby!” Mrs. Dobbs called out. “I’m coming!”

“Oh, my God,” cried Ginny, “no, God! No! What did I do!”
The kitchen floor had been covered in linoleum when she and Trenton were children, but her mother had always complained about how hard it was to sweep and mop, how it always seemed to have an oily feeling after so many hours of exposure to cooking. The truth was her mother simply hadn’t liked linoleum. She had worn Mr. Dobbs’s resistance down and had eventually succeeded in talking him into removing it, and modernizing their kitchen floor to an appealing tiled finish in an off-white color.
As her mother well knew, it could get slippery. Especially when covered in blood.
Ginny ran to her fallen brother but she never made it. Her legs slipped from under her and she fell flat on her back, hitting the floor with the back of her head almost as hard as she had hit her brother’s head with the scalding pot. Her back on fire, she instantly felt a terrible cramp taking hold of her distended belly, already showing signs of a pregnancy. She had an instant to understand why people said they saw stars at times like this. They weren’t stars. They were a sort of fading lights, not unlike that special effect used in the old Star Wars movies in the instant when a space ship goes into hyper drive and accelerates to the speed of light. Then she thought, “My Baby!” and she tried to sit up.
At first she thought she must have gotten wet with the broth spilt all over the kitchen. A second later she feared her bladder had let go in her fall, and she had wet herself. When she looked down she saw that she was bleeding, and understood how terribly wrong things had gone in seconds.
As terrible pain spread throughout her head, her vision dimmed. She had enough presence of mind left to understand she had really hurt herself in the fall, and not just by endangering the life of her baby.
She was crying as she managed to half-sit on the floor with her legs splayed out in a V. Her dead brother lied face down between her feet with a hole on his head the size of an orange. Then her mother came into the kitchen, took in the scene that awaited her beyond the kitchen door, and fell against it, her mouth open, a look of horror on her face.
“What…?” she started to say, then clutching her left arm, she bent forward.
“Mom!” Ginny shrieked and she tried to get up. She failed and fell back on her butt again, her legs unable to sustain her weight. “Mom! What’s wrong!”
“Heart…” her mother groaned, as she took a step forward and managed to rest her forehead on the table, her hand beginning to massage her chest.
Ginny started dragging herself towards her mother, then, awash in unreality. She was supposed to heat up the chicken broth. She had to get to her mother, help her on a chair and then heat up the chicken broth for her father. Her legs found no purchase on that slippery, but modern, tiled floor. She was leaving streaks of blood behind her every time her foot tried to push the rest of her body forward. She was in horrible pain herself, now, and she felt her consciousness ebbing, her head swooning, her eyesight fading in and out of focus. She felt pain everywhere now. I’ll have to get one of dad’s injections for myself she thought crazily. She succeeded in wedging one foot against the table and push herself forward a little, while pushing the table back, away from her.
“Mom?”
Mrs. Dobbs was now lying on the floor, on her side, with her eyes closed, her right arm massaging her chest. Her lips were moving, making no sound. The house was completely still, as dead as… “My brother,” she said out loud. Only her labored breathing breaking the ominous silence.
At the words, her mother moaned.
Ginny worked her legs under her and crawled towards her mother. It was harder this time, now that she didn’t have the table to push forward on. Painstakingly moving one knee forward, balancing, then shifting her weight to push the other, she had advanced perhaps three feet when she looked up again. Her mother wasn’t moving. Her mother’s eyes were closed. She stopped, focusing her eyes, perilously weak and sleepy, she fought the dizziness that had crept up on her and threatened to take her into a void of darkness.
Darkness beckoned and she thought it was peaceful there. She just had to reach her mother, make sure she was alright before she could give in to it. Hello darkness, my old friend.
She thought her mother wasn’t breathing.
“Mom!”
Ginny reached her mother and climbed on her elbows until her head was resting against her chest.
No movement. No sound.
Ginny knew no more.

Jackson Dobbs returned from a realm where pain was a background constant, to a realm where pain stood tall, right smack in center stage, as soon as his wife left the room. Pain was everything. Pain was everywhere. Every drop of sweat on his fevered body contained a symphony of pain, as it ran down his forehead, onto his nose, sliding down, festering on his dry, broken lips, spreading the taste of pain into his mouth. Pain is a hungry beast; it is never bested, and it always feeds. Awakened from its slumber, the beast immediately gripped his legs in its claws and sank its murderous fangs on Jackson’s calves, it took a chunk of flesh from his thighs, it gnawed at the bones of his knees, it drooled its acidic spittle, burning his groin. With his body fully under its unforgiving control, pain clutched Jackson’s brain and shook it and squeezed; pain stroke his inner organs; pain tore his throat to ribbons; pain throbbed in his ears. Pain was the master of the universe, and he was a broken heap of bones and flesh sacrificed to the ravenous emperor to bite and lick and savor at its will.
But he could hear the commotion downstairs.
His fogged brain retained just enough rationality to comprehend that something of import was taking place in the kitchen, his eternal soul ached at not being able to do anything about it.
Pain was unbearable.
The doctors said this amount of pain was the result of his organism having become dependent on morphine by now. After multiple regular doses of morphine, his system shouldn’t be able to decode these sensations as pain, anymore. It was the