A strange one-shot that popped into my head whilst listening to - of all things - Journey. Zach Braff is right. They're a fantastic band.
Not mine. Not now. Not ever.
Limestone
I had him.
I had him in my grasp, clinging to me like a wet dog on a lifeboat. He gripped my shoulders tightly, too fragile to let the tears fall down. Too parched to form words, too drenched to raise eyelids.
He seemed to stop breathing, just as I tried to let go.
We stood in that hallway for hours. I raised my head above his and watched life pass us by. Babies. Mothers. Teenagers. Fathers. Grandparents. Siblings.
Cadavers.
God only knows which ones were theirs. The trolleys lined the hallway, as if awaiting permission to leave. A final goodbye from us before departing for the great beyond.
I led him to each of them. Their faces revealed for a moment, the horrors tucked away beneath the plastic.
They could have been sleeping.
He whispered a prayer to each, stroking their faces as if he were Midas. I had never known him to be a spiritual man, yet the sincerity in every whispered breath struck me with a force rarely seen in this world.
To each an elegy; for each, a part of his soul.
The final trolley all but pierced my chest. A mother and child, taken long before their time. They lay on one sheet, together as nature intended.
As nature giveth, so nature taketh away.
My arm around his shoulders; his arm around my back. We shuffled towards them, neither one of us willing to let go. He knelt at their heads, the stillness of the child sending ice-shards through my veins. No child should ever be that still.
He gave a silent speech. His love for her, their love for their darling child. Years together, through happiness and anger. Their differences had only made them stronger: their love eternal, like a candle in the eye of a hurricane.
I gave him time. The sun had risen, fallen, and risen again, so that the hallway was bathed in a shallow half-light. We stood there, together, two cracking limestone pillars against a rush of salty waves.
Eventually, I bent down to meet him on his knees. His hair was lank and lifeless, his skin turned sallow and grey. The sun had left his once-cerulean eyes, replaced by a tangle of spider-webs.
'I'm here, Perry.'
He looked up at me for the first time, his eyes flooded with grief. The final farewells had taken what little strength and warmth he had. I was staring at the deep recesses of his soul.
'I know.'
His reply, raspy and shaky as it may have been, solidified one thing in my overcast mind. As we rose as one to greet the twilight, to cast off the bodies of those we'd known and lost, to shine our flashlights against the bitter gloom, I had but one certainty.
I still had him.