She had waited until her husband and children were far away, and had driven into the snowy woods, and ended it. Just let it all go.
She had wanted the pain to stop. The heart-hurt. She slept her way into death, only waking when the Highway Patrol found her body.
She was cold, rigid, frozen, when they found her.
Someone like that, said the patrolwoman. You'd think she'd have everything to live for.
She tried to speak, to tell them that that was what made the pain unbearable but, like someone caught in a bad dream, she could not make herself heard. She screamed, and no sound came out. She watched as they took her body away.
She sat by the side of the road, in the snow, all bodiless and afraid, waiting for the happiness to start.
You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly...
But - you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar, ask yourselves, all of you... what power would hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?
I have said that my grandfather was and had always been a mysteriarch, never a philanthropist of the mind, not a restorer of wounded psyches. In no way did he take a therapeutic approach with the inmates at the sanitarium. He did not view them as souls that were possessed, either by demons or by their own painful histories, but as beings who held a strange alliance with other orders of existence, who contained within themselves a particle of something eternal, a golden speck of magic which he thought might be enlarged. Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients' madness, but to exasperate it -- to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human qualities remained in these people. Read more »
