The worst night of my life wasn’t the night of my wife’s death. The worst night was every night since.
Month: December 2017
Something is knocking under the frozen lake
Knock. I’m at least fifteen feet from the frozen shore when I hear it. The ice feels as solid as concrete, so I take another step. The Winnibigoshish is like most of the Minnesota ice out lakes which will remain frozen until Spring. There’s no chance of breaking through. At least that’s what my girlfriend Amy keeps telling me.
She can’t tell lies if she can’t speak
GORE WARNING
Repeat after me:
I must not tell lies. I must not tell lies. I CANNOT tell lies. Or else.
Something else listens to the midnight prayers
Years ago when I was in jail, I used to pray every night. When you’re little and you pray, it’s because you want something from the world that you don’t know how to get. When you’re older, it’s because the world wants something from you that you don’t know how to give. The lights would go out at 11 PM and I would pray to be a better man, humiliating myself before the arbitrating silence of my thoughts, begging and pleading and even screaming when the thoughts became too loud to contain.
The storm is alive
It’s hard to type. My fingers are stiff and numb from the cold. My eyes are watering up, and I can feel the tears freezing on my skin. I don’t know how much longer my power is going to last this time, but I don’t think we will survive another blackout. When they find our bodies — maybe not until Spring when this cabin can be seen over the snow — they’ll know it was the storm that killed us. If I didn’t write this though, they’d never know it was a murder.
The head transplant was almost successful
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
-Julius Oppenheimer on the first atomic bomb.