Chapter 1
All I could feel was fire. On my arms. On my legs. My lungs burned. Why had this happened? What had I done to deserve this? Nothing! I had never done anything to anyone!
I had come home from work to dinner. I worked at a factory where we poured steel. It was hard work, and the boss sucked. But I made decent money. My wife, despite not being a paragon of the kitchen, had made spaghetti.
I loved the woman, but Razz wasn't what you would call a master chief. She was trying though. That was all that mattered. And she was a lot better than she used to be.
That's how love works. You improve each other. Cover each other's weaknesses. I taught her how to cook without setting water on fire. She showed me how to take care of a car without shorting out the battery while filling gas.
She worked at the local mechanics shop. Woe be the fool that told her to stay out of the workshop and get in the kitchen. She grew up in a family of mechanics. She could take your car apart , clean it out, and put it back together blind folded.
I loved this woman. She was a bit on the short side, kinda petite. But don't let her hear you saying that. She had quite the temper.
As I walked in the door, the first thing I smelt was the garlic bread. A quick expedition to the kitchen showed me the meal itself.
We had been trying to eat meals at the table instead of in front of the tv. Figuring, nearly in our 30s, it was time to start acting like adults. Or, that's how she put it.
She was standing in the kitchen. Stirring the pot. She was still in her overalls. Her brow creased in concentration.
"Hey" I said from the doorway. She glanced over at me.
"Hey" she said eloquently.
"You know what they say about a watched pot right?". I teased.
"Shh. It's almost done. Why do smell like smoke?" she asked with a scrunched nose.
"Why do you smell like oil" I shot back. It was a game we played. We would rib each other over forgetting to change out of our work uniform.
I decided to make myself useful and set the table. I was so hungry, I could have mistaken the spagetti for a dish prepared by Gorden Rasmey himself.
It had been pleasant in a soft homely sort of way. The kind of moment one recalls with fondness in old age I imagine. Or, it would have been.
I am, or, was? No, am, a simple man. I go to work, I pay my bills. Life is stressful. The world's a shit show. If you'll pardon my language. It's a struggle, but moments like this had made it all worth it. Until the table had been thrown to the side and everything on it too.
We had a large window facing the road in our kitchen. It was one of the selling points of the house. I say that like I owned it. In reality we still had around 200k to pay off on the mortgage.
But from the window, in that brief glimpse of time I had before the window exploded and blinded me with its shrapnel, I saw fire. A burning ball of indescribable incandescence. Like the sun itself had been dropped on our small town.
I didn't even have time to feel fear. Not before everything was fire. I was blinded, my ears had been blown and yet I could still hear the rasping screams that came out of my mouth.
The fire covered me head to toe. In every way. It was INSIDE me! And yet, what followed was even worse somehow. The cold. As I lay there, ice offering no relief, I could feel just the hint of weight on my arm.
My wife. She had been with her back to the window. She would have been more exposed than me. She must have been thrown forward. As I lay there, I couldn't help but wish for eyes to weep. Mine had burned away to nothing. I didn't deserve her. She was the light of my life.
In that darkness, with just the soft weight of her hand on my arm, I felt almost at peace.
It was so dark, I noted. I could feel nothing. Like a mind floating in a void.
Death seemed to take so long. Why prolong my suffering? The cold of the abyss was overwhelming. Was cold the default feeling for lack of sensation? I didn't know. All I could do was wait and ponder until I could ponder no more. had time to think. And that was worse, in this moment, than the hellfire.
In this place ,between life and death, I had time to remember. Time to regret. Regret, I decided, is a funny thing. It makes you want to be better than you were. To do better than you did.
They often say hind site is 20/20. Regret is a lot like hind site. The actions you should have taken are crystal clear. It makes you ponder outcomes of different choices. What would happen if I, insert scenario. But that's the funny thing about it. It only comes after the fact. Regret always comes too late.
I think I felt my lungs attempt to laugh at the thought. But, death is a lot like sleep. You don't notice the moment it happens. Its impossible to tell exactly when. But at some point the pain stopped, and all I felt was the cold.
