Short Stories

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The bleak grey cloak of night
Finally ended when the sun came
Unbidden and unwanted
To usher in a new day

Its dull first light peeked
Around the edges of drawn shades
In the loud silence that hung
In the next morning

Although emotionally all life
Had stopped at 12:36 the previous night
The new day stubbornly persisted
With all its implications and expectations

Time moved on
Life went on
Or so the new day
Insisted

The digital clock at the bedside
Burned a faded red into the
Dim remaining darkness and ticked off
Another minute that had finally passed

The air had been shattered
With words, sounds given brief life
But now still lived in the echoes of memory
In the eternity lasting between moment
after interminable moment

A heavy numbness settled into the morning
Palpable, tangible
Filling the void of the emptiness
Left behind by the previous night's portend

The future had been rent
Torn asunder in one stunning stroke
All the Tomorrows To Be had been shattered
And this new day was the first casualty
in a long line to come

All that was, and is, and is to be
Slowly swirled into a surreal cacophony
Of memories jaded
And hopes made destitute

And the words from
The night previous
Echoed even still
In its violent reverberation

A movement--
A slow deliberate shifting
And its accompanying sound
Reluctantly responds to the dimming day

The first breath is heavy
A prolonged reluctant sigh
Laboring against the eternities
That lay before it

A slight moan slipping out
As the night's events
Unfold in the mind
And replay again and again and yet again

Repeating without ceasing
The mundane trappings around
The walls, the furnishings, the decorations,
Even the slight imperfections scattered about

They are intimately familiar
But its context is strange
In the absence
That it betrays:

The profound silence
Of one less breath;
One less stirring;
One less presence;

And what remains
In the stillness of the morning
Is a soul set utterly adrift
Alone and rudderless

And all the potential Forevers
Reverberate with this same resonance
Of shattered silence
In the still of the morning hour

And so my first day of despair begins…

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