Closure, confusedalarms . [best novels for students txt] 📗

'I'm sorry, Ms. Kimble, she didn't make it.'


I sat there for hours after that. Just sat there, thinking about what had happened, how fast it all had gone. All that time spent in that green hardback plastic chair outside the door of the E.R., in that hallway, under the glare of the fluorescent lighting. I guess that last bit got to me after a while. I started thinking about religion. I had been a strict catholic all my life, but now...I just couldn't see why God would allow such a pointless, tragic thing to occur, and so soon. By the time I left the hospital I had renounced the faith my parents had so carefully indoctrinated.


Two weeks later. Sitting alone in what used to be her room. Cheerful princesses smiling at me from the walls. I knew I wasn't supposed to be here, knew I was supposed to be as far away from here as possible, but I couldn't help it. I felt like I needed closure. The only way, it seemed to me, to do so, was to return to the place where it had happened. Yes, that was the right thing to do. So I went there not after careful thought and consideration about what might go wrong, but just on a whim. And maybe that did it in the end.


Now I was there again, and it wasn't good. I realized that the moment I walked in, but there was no turning back. I had to do it now. So I sat down in the exact same chair again. Looked long and hard at the simple Ikea-model clock above the E.R. door, the clock you see everywhere, but for some reason never in any office or other professional business building. Except here. And the clock said the time was 11:43 pm. The exact time when...that brought the repressed memories back. I saw, in a vision, nurses come running down the hallway, rolling a stretcher covered in blood, with her on it, sedated by morfine, and that did it. What I had been thinking about since the doctor's least favorite sentence pushed through to the surface of my mind. And right over there, about 10 meters that way, was the door that lead to relief. To sweet nothingness. The door read Medicine

storage-Employees only.

And it was ajar. I went in.


(395 words)

Publication Date: 12-18-2011

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