AMKent books

Opening Scene

“It’s loss, Sally; it’s a tragic loss.”

She scribbles deep shades into the mandible of a self-portrait on her notepad.

“No, it isn’t loss, it’s something else entirely.”

“What is it other than loss?”

“I dreamt about him, my baby boy, he had no colour.”

The screen she is speaking to is black, her distorted reflection aids the portrait.

“Possibly an unconscious reference to death.”

“No, he wasn’t dead. It’s like he didn’t exist, his skin was the colour of limbo.”

There is a silence in the room, soon filled with rough scribbling.

“Limbo does not exist Sally.”

The shine of condensed lead dragged through paper steals her attention, and for a moment her mind scatters to admiration that the nib has not torn through.

“I am bound by linguistic capabilities, there is nothing I can say.”

“Time heals all Sally.”

“I don’t want to heal, or grow around it, or through it. I am not grieving; I am not sad.”

“You feel you are in limbo?”

“No.”

“You miss your child Sally, if you could turn back time or somehow get him back you would. This is grief, this is loss, this is the beauty of life and the tragedy of death.”

“I wouldn’t want him back, not again, how dare this happen.”

Sally drops her notepad onto the table and scrunches her fists to her head. The screen is blank due to the secrecy of the island, outside sources, even therapists, cannot know the appearance or voice of the researchers. Everything she says is converted to text. Despite this anonymity, only approved personnel by the island’s directors are allowed to speak to anyone.

“You are angry, this is still a part of grief.”

Sally drags the portrait across the table and smudges the residue of lead across the face.

“I’m alive.”

“You are, and so was he. He’s just no longer in the same form he once was, the linearity of time is an illusion, I am sure you already know this.”

“It’s not linear, I wish he never existed at all, or I, or my mother and the whole fucking lineage.”

“You can’t change your place in the universe, you must accept that you exist, that he existed. Humans are resilient, they are designed to keep moving through unimaginable traumas, both physically and mentally. You, even now, are moving; Sally, you are moving be it with your consent or without it. Just keep moving, one day we will all join whatever it is that lies past this, if anything at all.”

“It’s a punishment.”

“No, it’s just the ramifications of being finite.”

Sally looks at her arms: wounds white and purple, thick and thin, horizontal and vertical.

“No, being finite isn’t the punishment, but feeling the torment of it in a vacuum of infinity is.”

There are a few seconds of silence before the words ‘SESSION OVER’ appear on the screen. The connection is severed. Sally opens her laptop and begins to type an email penned to Dr. Thomas Hoyle; it reads.

“I am too old to be this lost Tom. All I have is a seat on the carousel of sorrow, and the intermissions between the next rides. Linear does not mean progression, that was my misconception of things. It aches, everywhere and almost all the time, like I said, intermissions. There are a whole lot of stories that can be, some might be the best sensation ever. I have no appetite though, like those who starve and thirst for so long that to satiate them too much would only kill them quicker. Conundrums, no one said things would be baseline, they just hope, but in the era of social constructions how long will hope last? I wanted my mother; emotional foundations were crumbling. I got her and lost something in return, it’s no one’s fault but my own. I had a choice, or at least it seemed that way, I had lost a lot that year, and this ended up being the biggest. I’m in a rotting mind, voices echo from the mist telling me to keep walking this way and the other, apparently it ends. I wonder, are they in the found, the healthy, a paradise or an Earth, a comfortable tailored Hell, somewhere in-between, or maybe it’s all just a more pleasant part of the rot? Crazy, the mammalian flea drank bittersweet blood, a snake sheds skin, a tarantula does the same, and lots of things do. Cyborgs and biological purges, string changes and new engines, smiles and frowns along with dry eyes and wet ones. Somewhere there’s ‘something’, how useful that ‘something’ is though? I guess it’s up to my imagination.”