She remembers so many terrible things.
The white-hot agony, the strobing vision, the wounded cries that went unanswered.
And there, still, a phantom pain at the very center of her. Something like talons ripping through the meat of her. It comes and goes in waves, knocks the air out of her, kicks the earth off its axis until she can suck in a sharp breath and force everything back into order.
She remembers the child. A child like the devil torn out of her uterus. And then the impenetrable darkness. She remembers moving slow toward the gate, buffeted along by the rest of the dead. She had not known, in the beginning, that she was dead. Had not known she was dead until she emerged from the afterlife and stumbled up the beach back toward civilization.
Perhaps she should have, with the way she’d staggered through so many worlds, crying out for the child. Her child. And no answer ever came. Sometimes she swore she could hear him, though, crying out for her.
And then she’d returned to the world and known that the child had never answered because she’d died and the child had not. This filled her with some great hope, Bible, hope that she might find the child somewhere out in the world.
She had drawn in her first breath on the beach and it had burned all the way down. It burns even now, as she emerges in the meadow. Is this where she’d given life to the child? Is this where she had given herself up to save it? Is that how it had happened at all?
She does not know how long she has been dead. She does not know that it has been years. She does not know that it will be no use when she tips back her head and cries out for the child again.
i didn't need to go where a bible went
@[Jassal]