Fantastic Metropolis

What I saw was a vision of Hell, and if there is a Hell after life it can never burn me the way this did.

The bed linen was awash with gore, all dyed red and fitfully black in the guttering candlelight. Arabella’s strangely peaceful face contrasted horrifyingly with her eviscerated womb, split from chest to reins, my twisted bloody child locked in its chamber lifeless, curled and stilled in the midst of its struggles to live, the umbilical around its neck. But it was the doctor who almost stopped my heart: his hands, his arms, his chest, were covered in my dear wife’s blood, and he was smearing his face with the gore, over and over, wiping it across his lips and cheeks and eyelids:

“It’s not here,” he said, coldly, angry, “Not here. I’ll never find it now, never.”

And then he looked at me, no emotion in his eyes, not so much as a hint of pity for me or sorrow for my wife.

“Look, Jerome,” he said, gesturing at Arabella’s open womb: “This is all we are. How can this… THIS… be conceived of love?”

Something had broken in him finally, I can see that now though I can never forgive it. So far as I am concerned he murdered Arabella and may he be damned for it. I will never know whether he tried to save the child, or save himself, but he failed on both counts, and succeeded only in taking away my hope and joy. But though love was never alive in him, he will never kill mine.

I see him now as I write these final words, in the archway of yews as I waited for my bride to join me at the alter. He was fascinated by the yew tree archway, the door from one state of being to the next, as though it might permit him, Dr Andrew North to move from his fated way of being to the one he most desired. It unnerved me how he circled their monstrous calloused trunks as though plotting their diameter by guesswork, or considering how deep their roots might grow. I care not what he thought or felt, if he felt anything, for I know only Arabella lies there now, ensnared by those roots for ever.

But Dr. North was a good tutor above all else, and what I learned from him ultimately was this: love does not indeed reside in the heart, or in the head or in any physical organ in either a real sense or a metaphorical one; and yet, how can it be that while my heart remains alive I feel at its very core a love which burns for my dearest one with a flame that can never be quenched?

John Dodds lives in Scotland and works as a Communications Manager at Communities Scotland. He is currently writing a crime novel, Bone Machines.