Tag Archives: 6S

The Mysterious Dr. Ramsey

June 26, 2010

He heard her knocking, knocking, and then finally pounding but he refused to answer, giving in only when he heard the pathetic weeping from beneath the door.

He walked through the apartment, past the rows of equipment, the empty cot, the folding chairs for family members, the vials and syringes he’d managed to keep after the lawyers and courts were done with him, and flung open the door to confront the girl who’d recognized him and then trailed him home from the sidewalk outside the grocery store.

Leave me, I cannot help you, he yelled at her, her skeletal face shrinking from his rage, her hands fluttering in defense, bat-like, her whole body beseeching, begging him to stop her pain but he would only glare until at last she dropped her eyes and murmured to the floor please, you must help me.

My time of helping is done, he said, and slamming the door on her need, went back to sit at his place by the window, staring down at the alleyway until he saw her shuffling body pulling away, yet even as she turned the corner he yelled through the broken glass, stop, I’ll help you, but it was too late, too late for them both, and closing the blind he sighed.

He sat awake far in to the night, thinking about his lost wife, his daughter, and knew the girl would come back.

At the end, they always came to him.

 

Included in the 6S Mysterious Dr. Ramsey http://www.amazon.com/6S-The-Mysterious-Dr-Ramsey/dp/1453661239

Right Before the Silence

June 23, 2010

Sometime after his third beer, a momentary fragment of pleasure crept into his troubled mind.

Gone for a minute was the dark and constant concern about his bitching boss, the worry of the mortgages, the nagging thoughts of a hungry and homeless retirement – tireless burdens which had turned his life into a gray and cheerless exercise.

For a moment, the pain in his side which he’d told his wife was surely cancer subsided, the twinge in his chest which he’d convinced himself was certainly a future heart attack was now gone, and he looked at his life as it could be; casting aside all regrets and recrimination, he told himself that it didn’t have to be as it had been, did it?

But his old, self-made reality quickly crashed back in and he tossed away the broken fragments of new found possibilities like so many shards of tired glass, stood and walked down the hall and into the kitchen, stepped over his sleeping dog and into the garage.

Unlocking his toolbox, he pulled out the black case from the third drawer down and to the right, and assembling the pistol secretly purchased months before for this very purpose he loaded a clip and with no hesitation at all put the steel of the barrel against his teeth.

And as the bullet entered his brain, he saw for the briefest millisecond his life as it really was; his now lost wife, his fatherless children, the job he would never go back to, the things he’d just now realized he should have shared with his unborn grandchildren, and in place of all this came only silence.

 

Published by Six Sentences http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2010/06/right-before-silence.html