The Nothingness of Memory
Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say, but Ruby sat at the bedside and wondered at the strength her mother summoned in her last hours to cry out as she did. Through the mounting pain, her mother had wept for home, for her parents, for her husband; Ruby swallowed back the bitterness of tears and sent her hatred out beyond the stars with her mother’s cries. She hoped that somewhere in that vast silent blackness, moving back toward a planet she could hardly remember, her father felt each cry like the swift and deep piercing of a needle to his heart. Ruby pictured him in her mind, bleeding slowly from the wound, and hoped he would die just as her mother would: terrified and calling for the ghosts of his past.
