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[oom] The Defining Moment
Hail Mary, full of grace...
The moment of her death spins out again in her dreams, exquisitely wrought, no detail too small to leave out. She can't escape from a single moment of it.
Our Lord is with thee...
A part of her doesn't want to. It has become the moment that defines her, divides her into two people: the Alex Drake who came before and the Alex Drake that came after.
Blessed art thou among women...
The actual gunshot sounds like a paper bag popping in Alex's head. The concussion slams against the inside of the hull, making the barge ring like being inside a cathedral bell. There's a puff of smoke from the barrel, and it takes an aeon for the sound to reach her, an aeon of that pock-marked projectile spiraling towards her.
and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus....
She imagines she can see her reflection in the polished point of the bullet, but that's impossible. She knows that lead melts and deforms at so many feet per second. That was the first moment her mind fractured, trying desperately to make sense of the next few fragments of time.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners...
She feels the impact far more than she hears it. When the wave of sound hits, it's nothing more than a pop. Almost anti-climatic.
Now and in the hour of our death...
When the bullet impacts her skull, there is no pain. (Holy Mary) No shattering of bone that she's aware of, no temporary wound cavity shredding the soft tissue. (Mother of God.) No, when the bullet hits, she feels nothing but silence and the sensation of falling through space. (Pray for us sinners.) The weightlessness reigns for another aeon. (Now and in the hour of our death.) Blind, deaf and dumb, she falls and the last image played out across her mind's eye is of birthday candles flickering in the wind of her passing.
The rest of it was bollocks. The attendants arriving. The helicopter airlift. The surgeon speaking to her as if she could understand him. All utter rubbish. A dream that happened to someone else.
My name is Alex Drake...
Her struggle was pure instinct, a mad flailing of her intellect trying desperately to interpret wildly inaccurate data. She is just a collection of rapidly firing synapses, bleeding off the last chemical energy before brain death. She's not really here, praying for herself, reciting the words over and over as the agony flares behind her eyes. She catches a whiff of cigarette smoke and wet earth, hears a murder of crows, their laughter raucous in the distance.
She wakes slowly, crawling back into the world (is it 1982? 2008?) and where others might feel relief, she only feels longing and a terrible sense of loss.
[ooc: Written 11/30/2010, inspired by this piece. ]
The moment of her death spins out again in her dreams, exquisitely wrought, no detail too small to leave out. She can't escape from a single moment of it.
Our Lord is with thee...
A part of her doesn't want to. It has become the moment that defines her, divides her into two people: the Alex Drake who came before and the Alex Drake that came after.
Blessed art thou among women...
The actual gunshot sounds like a paper bag popping in Alex's head. The concussion slams against the inside of the hull, making the barge ring like being inside a cathedral bell. There's a puff of smoke from the barrel, and it takes an aeon for the sound to reach her, an aeon of that pock-marked projectile spiraling towards her.
and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus....
She imagines she can see her reflection in the polished point of the bullet, but that's impossible. She knows that lead melts and deforms at so many feet per second. That was the first moment her mind fractured, trying desperately to make sense of the next few fragments of time.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners...
She feels the impact far more than she hears it. When the wave of sound hits, it's nothing more than a pop. Almost anti-climatic.
Now and in the hour of our death...
When the bullet impacts her skull, there is no pain. (Holy Mary) No shattering of bone that she's aware of, no temporary wound cavity shredding the soft tissue. (Mother of God.) No, when the bullet hits, she feels nothing but silence and the sensation of falling through space. (Pray for us sinners.) The weightlessness reigns for another aeon. (Now and in the hour of our death.) Blind, deaf and dumb, she falls and the last image played out across her mind's eye is of birthday candles flickering in the wind of her passing.
The rest of it was bollocks. The attendants arriving. The helicopter airlift. The surgeon speaking to her as if she could understand him. All utter rubbish. A dream that happened to someone else.
My name is Alex Drake...
Her struggle was pure instinct, a mad flailing of her intellect trying desperately to interpret wildly inaccurate data. She is just a collection of rapidly firing synapses, bleeding off the last chemical energy before brain death. She's not really here, praying for herself, reciting the words over and over as the agony flares behind her eyes. She catches a whiff of cigarette smoke and wet earth, hears a murder of crows, their laughter raucous in the distance.
She wakes slowly, crawling back into the world (is it 1982? 2008?) and where others might feel relief, she only feels longing and a terrible sense of loss.
[ooc: Written 11/30/2010, inspired by this piece. ]