Twisted Reality

Dirty, cold feet shuffled down the ancient bridge at an agonizingly slow pace. The small feet seemed to be barren of any shoes or even stockings that might shield them from the chilled air of the late autumn evening. The owner of these feet quietly, almost silently argued with himself over numerous topics, anything  and everything that might come to his mind in a given moment. After a few minutes of the quiet arguments with himself, the sounds of Oslo's bells ringing out and the springy creaking of the wooden planks that had once been a dazzling blue yanked the man from his thoughts and submerged him once again into the real world around him that he seemed never able to escape from. Looking around, the man noticed the eyes of the strangers he had never noticed before on him. He had been speaking aloud once again.

Gazing around at the few onlookers that had attempted to take a peaceful stroll through the city, he huffed and glared at them. "What?" he growled in a hoarse and vaguely drunken voice, "Have none of you nothing to wonder? Nothing to decide for yourselves? No! Of course not! You leave it to them to decide!" A boney finger stabbed at the faint light of Oslo Cathedral off in the distance, signaling to the crowd who he was speaking of, "You let them do it all for you! Making your own choices is too hard for you! Blasphemy! Insanity!"

The people gasped at his words and muttered to one another in hushed tones as they hurried away from the asinine man. He simply huffed again and continued to rant to himself on the lonely bridge, speaking and arguing aloud with himself, only stopping once in a long while to remind the repetitive bells of his hatred of them and of the curse they represented each hour they rang out over the city. Any who passed would have thought the man was a crazy drunk. He was, however, perfectly sober in mind and spirit. He had no time to waste away on spirits, nor did he have the money to waste on them.

Time passed slowly as the light of day faded and the sun set over the mountain range on the distant horizon. The evening was calm; however, the man still stood arguing with himself as he paced back and forth, back and forth, on the desolate, rickety bridge. He was unable to calm himself, unable to pull himself from the delusions. He had no home to go to , no friends to see, no family to confide in. Nothing at all. He was... Alone.

Climbing up to the pale, wooden railing, the man stared down at the icy waters below and once again contemplated his next move. The hallucinations he had been having, the pain in his head, it was all too much to take. What kind of God would condone such torture for the poor man? What kind of God would allow the life he had lived? What kind of God would approve of the horrors he had been put through? With a final cry, a final prayer, his final scream to the heavens, the man leapt from the railing to plunge into the icy waters below without hesitation.

The loud thud of something colliding with the padded ground of the cell behind him pulled the doctor away from his conversation with one of the nurses. He gazed into the room and sighed as he watched his poor patient writhing on the ground, screaming and cursing the institution he called a hallucination of his and trying to hit his head on the wall.

"Such a sad case," muttered the doctor next to him, who only nodded in agreement.

"Sedate him," he ordered in a solemn tone as two men entered the room to medicate the patient.

For four years, the man had switched from vegetative like states to the violent shrieking and thrashing he was doing now. The doctor had tried everything, but nothing worked to calm the sick man. His family had stopped visiting, and it pained his wife too much to see him this way. He had endured the war, endured the camps, and endured the death and destruction and cruelty of it all. In the end, he was unable to adapt back to a normal life in this world. He was unable to live with what he had done and what had happened to him, so he retreated back into his mind, back into a time and a place that he knew.

As the nurses managed to sedate him, the bells of Oslo Cathedral rang out and the man was forced to drift off and back to sleep, his room dark save the last lights of the day peeking in through the window over the mountain range and above his head, sending him back into his vegetative state.