A Mirror of Eden

Chapter Twelve: When the Monster Fights Through the Decimating Silence of Grief

Leonardo Sovrano

My voice had long gone raw. My screams no longer tumbled past my dried bloodied lips. Everything was silent and bitter. The normally cooling breeze that came from the ocean to sooth me felt like prickles of the driest ice. Sharp and unyielding. Puncture after puncture stole a piece of my breath by the millisecond until my heart rate began to plummet. My heart was beating, I was only sure of that because unfortunately I was still alive, but the normally strong thump against my chest was so faint that it was but a child's tap on a frosted window. A sound so small and obsolete that it couldn't be heard unless one knew the child tapping was there in the first place.

It was painful. Every incision, every tap, was brutal. I was blessed, in a way, when my mother died because death was an anomaly to me. I didn't fully understand it despite being left to deal with it's bashful grief. I had questions, the waves of its ever lingering pain spiraled through me all throughout my life, but the initial pain of it was unclear which meant I didn't have to sit with it or process it. This was world's different. Now, I'd taken enough lives to know how permanent death was. How lonely it was. I'd sat in enough funerals to know how longstanding and tumultuous grief was when old enough to process it.

It feels like suffocation of the highest scale. It's blistering and frustrating because just as it was when I was six, it's confusing. Then, what causes the most outrage is the fact that the confusion is there in the first place. What is there to be confused about? I'm in shock that he isn't here, but his lifeless body is in my hands. I've waited for him to move, to speak, to pat my hand and tell me that everything will be fine for us, but his chest has not moved since the revolution of my world screeched to a halt. I know that he is gone. I know that his voice will never grace my ears in the flesh again, but I can't make myself believe that to be true. I can't make myself believe that this pain is real. That he won't wake up. That I won't wake up and this won't be real. But I know. I fucking know how real this is, and the anger is so grave that on its own chemical contraction it's festered itself into the deepest variant of pain I never knew to exist until now.

I heard the squeak of the door, and the sound of footsteps on the pavement, but I couldn't bring myself to move until a firm hand came on my shoulder. I blinked from my focused stare to see who dared touch me and was met with gracious green eyes of Henry who seemed timid and hurt for me in his slow approach.

"Leonardo, we've called in the crew to conduct the clean up. We also got Gia, but we haven't told her anything. She's downstairs with Alex and her detail asking for you but we've told her nothing. How you want to do this is up to you, my friend. Any burden you want me or Alex to carry I promise we will," His voice came through, and as my body started to feel, the heaviness of his hand on my shoulder almost sent me to the ground with how weak I felt. I clung to the body in my arms and squeezed my eyes shut as every inhale I took stung.