No More Fighting

The ward is quiet now and almost in darkness, just a single desk lamp glowing at the nursing station.

The staff nurse begins her round of sleeping patients. In the first side room is the lady of seventy-nine they expected to lose a week ago, the one who is visited twice daily by the very tall boy who calls her Nain.

She is calm now, sleeping deeply after that episode earlier when she awoke so unexpectedly.

The nurse listens to her breathing. Slow. Irregular. A faint gurgling from the throat. A pulse is taken – barely there.

She takes a seat beside the bed and strokes that cold hand. She’s done this job long enough to know.

‘You go well, my sweet darling,’ the nurse whispers. ‘You go well.’

Level Crossing

The world around him tumbles and spins. Sky. Ground. Snow. Train. Ground. Sky. It feels like he’s been airborne for many minutes. Will’s landing, when it comes, is gentle. Like falling into a bed of feathers.

The night sky is clear. Inky black. No snow is falling on him.

There is no pain. No hint even of discomfort.

His eyes lose their focus.

His own weight melts away.

He has the very real sensation of his head opening like a butterfly. Of his mind being presented to the world.

No longer is what Will sees channelled through the constrictions of his eyes; nor is what he hears reduced by his ears. He is outside the cage. Outside the prison of himself.

The sky lights up above him like the most breathtaking firework display. The burble of voices he hears is like a lullaby.

Will begins to rise towards this incredible light show. Floating. Flying. The world, unfiltered by human experience, is more spectacular than anything any brain could imagine.

Will knows that this is it. Death. The end. But it doesn’t seem to matter. His fading consciousness is taking him on a magical mystery tour, and he has no sense of wishing to be anywhere else.

Order to chaos.

Those words roll around his unlocked mind.

Hasn’t he just disproved this very theory? Has his final act not made order where otherwise chaos would have reigned?

He is beginning to understand. This universe does move from order to chaos.

But is that, perhaps, why there has to be life? Is the very reason for the existence of life to disrupt this inevitable flow, to reverse the trend? Are we, in fact, here to make order out of chaos, sense from the senseless, something where there is nothing? Do we exist so that we might save the universe from itself?

Is that it, Will vaguely wonders, is that the meaning of life? To create order from chaos? How strange that the mystery of our own existence should only unravel as it comes to its end.