When the Pain is Too Great to Swallow

“That’s it. I’m calling it,” says the doctor as he takes his gloved hands off Cassandra’s charred body. “Time of death,” he looks at the clock on the wall and officially declares it is, “11:23 a.m.”

The doctors and nurses fall back from her lifeless remains, receding like they are sliding instead of walking.

Unable to rise out of her body, Cassandra remains locked inside burnt flesh— unmoving, unfeeling, but not unaware. Her hearing remains sharp, and her vision is expanded, unrestricted by line of sight. Her astral eyes can view everything around her, everything in this room, as the people-in-white begin powering down their machines.

On old nurse seems to speak for all the mortals present when she exclaims, “What a horrible way to die!”

Another nurse observes, “At least most of her face wasn’t burnt too bad.”

Cassandra smiles inwardly, her deceased lips incapable of doing it outwardly. Her hair is all gone, but of course she didn’t allow her entire face to be burned.

She had to be certain Sidney will recognize her!

⚡__________👨🏻‍💼______________⚡

“The room was registered to Sandra Smith,” says the police officer standing just across the threshold of Sidney Southworth’s modest home.

“What are you saying?” Sidney shook his head, his face clenched. “Are you saying Sandra was staying at a motel when it caught fire? She wouldn’t go to any motel!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Southworth,” says a man who looks like Buddy Epson. “We have reason to believe your fiancée was killed.”

“No,” says Sidney, not believing this nonsense for one red instant. “You’ve made some kind of mistake.” He’s not just in love with Sandra, he is in tune with her. If she were dead, he would know it. This is too unreal.

“You said it yourself,” states the officer. “You haven’t heard from her since yesterday morning, right?”

Sidney's heart chugs like an overheated locomotive engine. A motel?!? Entertaining the prospect that his beloved is having an affair is even more preposterous than the idea she could be dead. Sandra is unwaveringly faithful.

So why, then, did the thought cross his mind?

“There is a woman of Miss Smith’s approximate age and description who perished in the fire. We need to see if you can identify the body. Would you please accompany me to the hospital?”

Sidney shutters. “The hospital?”

⚡__________🧛🏻‍♀️______________⚡

Her preternatural body is immune to fire; it can be charred but not incinerated. That is why she generally chooses flames as her means of ‘death.’

Self-immolation is Cassandra’s preferred method of ending her relationships.

She eats human misery. She torments men by getting them to fall hopelessly in love with her... and then dies in some horrific manner, sucking up the resulting sorrow.

In addition to his grief, Sidney will provide her with a tasty brew of other spicy emotions: guilt, jealousy, anger, worry, regret. Because of her choice of death scenes, she anticipates slurping up a lot of salty doubts. It is grief that gives her sustenance, but Sidney’s other emotions will season the forthcoming meals, giving them added flavor.

She will drain him dry of tears, while picking her teeth with the shards of his broken heart.

Lying on a cold slab in the morgue, Cassandra is impatient. Until Sidney mourns, she remains bound to her seared corpse.

Outside her drawer, one of the lab technicians is whistling a happy tune. Cassandra is annoyed by all joyful noises. She can’t wait for the gasping and the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Sidney has a specific, tragic role to play in this drama and she is impatient for him to take the stage.

She licks spirit lips, hungry at the thought of all the bereaved people currently gathered around her.

Hurry up, you bastard! Come to me!

⚡__________👨🏻‍💼______________⚡

It takes Sidney every bit of self-control he can muster to force himself to enter the hospital.

When he was thirteen years old, he remembers hurrying here with his father. They arrived too late to see his Uncle Clark before his dad’s only brother was killed by a myocardial infarction. When he was twenty years old, he rushed to this same hospital when his father was involved in a horrifying automobile accident. After five hours of emergency surgery, his dad died. On that most terrible of days, Sidney swore he would never come back here ever again, not even if he was right across the street with a gushing head wound. But he loves Sandra so passionately, he braves this ordeal for her sake.

As they enter the lobby, he and the lawman pass by a nurse pushing a young woman in a wheelchair, flanked by a haggard young man. The escaping patient is probably in her mid-twenties, but the drooping black bags beneath her hollow eyes make her look much older. Her worried companion (husband?) also appears to have aged because of his experiences inside this building.

Sidney hates this place.

He is taken by his police escort to the elevators reserved for the staff. The slow plunge in the Otis is a surreal experience. He knows he’s going to the morgue, but it feels like a descent into Hell.

Officer Buddy asks him, “Are you okay, Mr. Southworth? You’re not going to pass out, are you?”

Sidney shakes his head. “No,” he says, telling the oldest lie: “I’m fine.”

The policeman keeps a wary eye on him.

After a long walk down brightly lit corridors, they finally reach the morgue. Sidney takes a chill as he enters.

Officer Somebody introduces a disinfected someone who works here. Sidney hears words being spoken, but their connections to concepts are utterly lost. Wondering if this is how boxers feel after taking a solid punch to the chin, he is stunned to find himself in a room where refrigerated bodies are kept. “I still can’t believe this,” he says generally to the space between both men, unable to bear looking at either set of eyes.

“I’m sorry,” says morgue-man, handing Sidney a cloth with alcohol on it. Sickened by just the thought of smelling roasted human flesh, Sidney holds the cloth over his nose.

The medical ghoul opens the hatch and pulls out a metal plank with a covered corpse on it. Looking more stern than compassionate, he tells Sidney, “Brace yourself,” and then he lowers the sheet to the dead woman’s neck, revealing a burnt-bald head and a singed face.

Shock, disbelief, and terrible grief shatter his soul. He actually hears his heart break; it sounds like an ashtray being smacked by a baseball bat.

Staring down at his fiancée, his entire body seems to stutter in its production of smoothly transmitted nerve impulses. It is Sandra, his soul mate, the love of his life! Seeing her dead is stupefying. His grief is unbearable. He realizes he’s sobbing and reacts by wailing even harder. Even when his father died, it didn’t hurt this bad.

He doesn’t distinctly remember falling, but he finds himself lying on the cold linoleum floor, unable to process this calamity, unable to stop crying, and when the pain hits him in the chest, he is already so short on breath, he quickly loses consciousness.

⚡__________🧛🏻‍♀️______________⚡

His grief releases her. The sound of Sidney’s heart breaking affects Cassandra like a starter’s pistol being fired at the outset of a race: her spirit bounds out of her body. She remains tethered to her physical shell, a dark cord of metaphysical energy flowing from the bellybutton of her discorporate form to the mouth of her corpse, but she now has total access to everyone within the confines of this hospital.

She can explore and feed.

Her consciousness watches over Sidney as he collapses to the floor. Her fiancé weeps and wails, his grief producing waves of invigorating sustenance, infusing Cassandra with power. She sucks up his misery, while coaxing more. This is mourning that she caused. For her, this is ecstasy.

Juiced by her ex's agony, Cassandra expands her awareness and immediately perceives the symphony of raw misery flooding out of the Intensive Care Unit. Drawn by that intensity, she doesn’t pay attention to the efforts made by mortals to save Sidney’s life, efforts that are ultimately in vain.

⚡__________👨🏻‍💼______________⚡

It is dark and murky. He is restless and disturbed. He suspects he’s suffering from some terrible kind of fever. Despite not being able to imagine where he could have run afoul of a tsetse fly here in autumnal Texas, he wonders if he might have contracted sleeping sickness.

Is this a waking coma?

He doesn’t understand what’s going on.

Sidney doesn’t remember dying. Nor does he remember that Sandra is dead. The last twenty-four hours are a wash.

This isn’t a dream. Despite the indistinctness (because of this indistinctness?), this is entirely too real. About the only thing he is certain of is that he is not dreaming.

A brilliant light calls to him— singing for him, reaching for him, welcoming him— but he shrugs off its influence.

He needs to find Sandra. He is suddenly very worried about Sandra, afraid she’ll be mad at him for something(s) he did in this haze, something(s) he doesn’t remember doing.

Why can’t he see properly? Despite his perceptions being so diminished, he goes looking for his beloved anyway.

⚡__________🧛🏻‍♀️______________⚡

As Cassandra’s astral form expands outward into the hospital’s Intensive Care unit, she pauses to nibble on a nurse who is still mourning the loss of her favorite poodle. Then the grief-eater hurries on to guzzle up the tonics provided by dying people and those who love them.

One woman on this ward just learned earlier today that her husband has an inoperable brain tumor; he's currently sleeping like he has already succumbed to it. Next door is a nineteen-year-old girl holding a death vigil at the bedside of her eighty-nine-year-old grandmother. Across the hall is a gasping man suffering from liver failure, attended by his tipsy wife. In yet another stale room, a prostitute that was injured in a terrible fall weeps silently, acutely aware she’s going to die alone.

For Cassandra, this is a grandiose smorgasbord, a scrumptious feast. Her malignant soul feels fat with griefy goodness.

The anguish served here is delicious!

Devouring the distress of these pathetic people will not alleviate their pain. In fact, the she-devil's unholy consumption acts in the opposite fashion, like an anticoagulant given to someone with a bleeding wound. The nineteen-year-old holding the vigil over her ebbing grandmother suddenly starts bawling so loudly, she quickly attracts the attention of the nurses. Simultaneously, wives in other rooms begin to weep.

The prostitute’s tears cease to flow as she dies alone.

⚡__________👨🏻‍💼______________⚡

There are phantom voices all around him, whispering and murmuring. Twice, Sidney could have sworn he heard some distant someone calling his name. He still can’t see very well, but he keeps catching glimpses of human movement with his peripheral vision.

When he calls out, “Is there anybody here?” he hears a “yes” and a “no” and, quite distinctly, a “who’s asking?” Someone laughs and someone screams.

“Who’s there?” he shouts in a louder voice that sounds softer.

Nothing answers this time but gaping silence.

The cold fog thickens around him, strangling his volition. Despair weighs him down, like malignant gravity. He feels insubstantial, as if he’s becoming the fog.

He wonders if his mind is unraveling.

But then he hears his lover groaning in ecstasy, sounding real and near. “Sandra?”

His honey will cure him! His sugar will awaken him! Sandra will rescue him from this doleful haze!

He draws instantly close to his love, traversing the distance between them in an instant. When he finds her and sees her in crystal-clear focus, he knows he is saved.

⚡__________🧛🏻‍♀️______________⚡

Cassandra has spirit-fed for the better part of a century and she has never seen a ghost.

So when she meets Sidney’s specter in a hallway on her way to the Emergency Room, she is profoundly startled. She shakes her spectral head and rubs her spectral eyes, muttering, “You’re not real.” She tells Sidney, in a flat, emphatic tone, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

The words are barely out of her ghostly mouth when a tangible man and his corporeal wife walk right through Sidney’s ethereal body. Sidney doesn’t seem to notice. Clearly, her oblivious ex doesn’t know he must have died.

She tells him again (as if she is hoping it might banish him), “I don’t believe in ghosts!”

Sidney nods. “I don’t believe in ghosts either.”

She can’t help but laugh.

“You’re dead, Sidney.” She takes malicious joy in giving him the bad news. “I’m guessing a heart attack killed you. Don’t you remember dying?”

⚡__________👨🏻‍💼______________⚡

Sidney can’t remember, no. What Sandra is saying makes no sense to him. A heart attack would hurt. The pain would be awful. Surely, he would remember agony that great.

But he doesn’t remember experiencing any pain at all. (He vaguely remembers a shattering sound and thought maybe that was his heart breaking, but surely that was just a nightmare.)

It doesn’t make any sense to him that he could die and not know it! So he asks Sandra, “Are you certain this isn’t a bad dream?”

⚡__________🧛🏻‍♀️______________⚡

“Oh, no,” says Cassandra. “This is no dream. You are really and truly dead.”

She is agitated to the extreme. She thought she was done with Sidney. What makes him so special that he’s the first of her victims to haunt her?

She expected to feed now on Sidney’s sadness. Instead she recoils as he experiences an unpalatable surge of hope.

It’s disgusting!

He gushes, “That means you’re an angel, right? My angel! And now we’re going to be together forever! Right?”

She laughs at him and then feels his hurt.

In a slippery instant, Cassandra flies at Sidney, orbiting him, roping him with her astral cord, like a boa constrictor murdering its meal. Coming face-to-face with this abhorrent man who has invaded her most private space, she yells furiously, “What makes you think I want to spend eternity with you? Now that you’re dead— dead, dead as doornail, dead!— I am free to tell you all the things I kept bottled up inside me when you were alive! Like the fact I loathe your laugh, and I loathe your taste in music, and I loathe your cheap cigarettes, and I generally loathe you!”

Sidney looks more baffled than ever. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Darlin'. You’re just upset. We love each other. We’re going to be married and live happily ever after.”

Cassandra punches him in the shoulder and she can tell he feels it, despite the fact neither of them currently possess flesh. “You idiot! I don’t love you! You’re food to me! You’re Monster Chow!”

He jumps, as if startled. “'Monster'?”

“Yes, Sidney!” Cassandra rages, “I’m a monster! A self-made monster! I had a choice about what I would become and I chose to bring grief to arrogant, self-obsessed pricks like you! Out of loathing, I made you love me so I could hurt you!” In a supernatural flash, she grabs his spirit-throat with both of her astral hands, shrieking, “Don’t you understand English, you imbecile! I DESPISE YOU WITH ALL MY MIGHT!”

She’s keenly startled when he staggers backwards, passing out of her grip and through her coils, as if he were smoke. Falling to the floor, he sits there, holding his legs. Looking up at her with glistening eyes, he asks her, “If you don’t love me, then why are we still together? If I’m dead, then you’re dead too, right? How did—?”

She cuts him off, shouting, “I’m not dead!”

Sidney’s discomfiture fuels Cassandra’s ever-growing anger. He persists, saying, “If I’m a ghost and they’re ghosts and you’re a ghost—”

“I’m not a ghost!” She stalks over to where he sits, looming over him. “I’m undead! There's a difference!” Even though her grip failed her before, she grabs him again, pulling him to his feet, yelling, “After spending the winter in a grave, my body will live again, unlike yours! You... are... dead!” She shoves him away, growling, “So shuffle off to your Eternal Reward and stop pestering me!”

That’s when she sees the other ghosts. It is like a gray veil dropping over her gaze which allows her to percieve all the earthbound anima who are using this corridor. The specter of a candy striper runs past. Other ethereal Texans are just standing around, loitering, watching, looking right at her. The phantom of a young intern walks by, staring down in horror at hands dripping with blood.

Some wraiths are big and wide, some skinny and short, some still, some jittery. Many are nothing but bleary gray outlines, but most have visible mouths, and all of them have eyes.

Cassandra doesn’t know what is worse: seeing them or knowing they can also see her. Her fury is murderous; and it’s Sidney who is responsible for it; but she can’t kill him, since he's already dead!

She turns her ferocious gaze on him, yelling, “What have you done to me?” She doesn't want to see these hopeless ghosts! She can even hear their moaning now! She won’t accept that either!

Sidney looks at her with platter-sized eyes and echoes, “What have you done to me?!?”

The same ghost candy striper runs by her again, as if on some kind of eternal loop. Cassandra feels energy withdrawing and turns to see what the other phantoms are doing.

En masse, the apparitions are speeding away, all drawn to some terrible commotion nearby. Curiosity cools Cassandra’s rage. She wonders where everyone is going.

She follows a mixed group of both living and dead people to the Emergency Room, a place quaking with anguish.

The moment she sees the fearful eyes of the nurses and the tense expressions of police and Secret Service men, Cassandra knows it is an extraordinary event that has drawn the stubborn ghosts here. Everyone who is alive seems to be yelling; shouted conversations overlap; while, unheard, lost spirits murmur and whimper. All the raw emotions swirl together with the violence of a poorly trapped tornado, creating an unearthly tension.

Over and over, she hears people say it, always in the same incredulous tone...

...............

“The President has been shot!”

⚡_____________👨🏻‍💼______________⚡

The mist is back with a swirling vengeance. Still bewildered by Sandra’s assertion that he’s dead, Sidney hears sobbing and focuses on it. After a timeless time, the air clears and he sees a cluster of people/souls gathered around a hospital gurney. From high above, lustrous beams shine down on the bloody face of a dying man. Sidney pushes forward (feeling no real resistance) until he is able to see who is lying beneath the singing spotlight.

The 1960 election was the first time Sidney voted in a decade. He was generally sardonic about casting his ballot and never felt his own vote mattered one wit, since he never voted the same as the majority of the other citizens in his state. (He was vehemently opposed to the Electoral College— in his opinion, second only to legalized slavery as America's forefathers' Worst Idea Ever.) And yet, despite his cynicism about politics, Sidney Southworth voted for John Kennedy in 1960. Something about that charismatic Catholic inspired him.

Staring now at the ravaged condition of the President’s pulverized head, he knows all these frantic doctors won't be able to save the Leader of the Free World. Shocked, a captive spectator to this terrible tragedy, memories are suddenly unlocked in Sidney's mind...

He had planned to go see the President’s motorcade today. He asked for the day off work weeks ago. That is why he was at home instead of at the office when the policeman came to tell him about Sandra.

He remembers the faces of the haggard girl in the wheelchair and her depleted partner as they left this hospital.

He remembers being in the morgue.

He remembers dying.

All these recollections are reborn at the precise moment John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s immortal soul lifts out his body and ascends into the light.

Other luminous shafts shine down, including one for Sidney.

Bearing witness to the bitter fate of America's youngest President helps Sidney to accept his own death. He stayed behind for Sandra, thinking she was his salvation, but he now knows she was truly an inhuman monster bent on causing him pain.

He knows she will pay a steep price for her wickedness.

Karma is a bitch!

He hears his father calling out to him. He smells his mother’s perfume. His grandma Southworth sings a gospel song with youthful vitality. All his other Lost Loved Ones are laughing with sublime joy.

Sidney Southworth gives up his haunt and goes home.

⚡__________🧛🏻‍♀️______________⚡

When the grief-eater touches the mind of the First Lady and feels Jacqueline’s shock and terror and heartache, she shudders with unthinkable bliss.

John Kennedy was declared dead only moments ago and already there is talk of moving the body, flying it back to Washington, D.C..

Mourning isn’t limited to the First Lady and the men sworn to protect the President. Even doctors and nurses are openly crying.

For Cassandra, it is like experiencing the formation of an ocean. Wherever knowledge of the President’s death spreads, grief goes with it. She senses this efflux of emotion has only just begun.

An excited cacophony of shrill voices creates a chaotic garble, but she is able to filter out the voice of one of dozens of reporters standing in nearby phone booths, calling in their stories...

“November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas,” says the newspaper man. “President John F. Kennedy was assassinated today in Dallas. The presidential motorcade was traveling through the main business area of the city when the President of the United States was shot three times, in the head and throat. Texas Governor John Connally was also seriously injured when he was hit in the back by one of the unknown sniper’s bullets.

“Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who was following in a different car and was uninjured in the attack, will be sworn in as the new President.

“President Kennedy was driven at speed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where. . . .”

Cassandra nearly swoons. It’s all coming too fast! There’s too much! It’s too potent! She has never experienced anything like this, not even after Pearl Harbor, not even when Lincoln was shot! (The country was so much smaller back then!)

She doesn’t know if she can take all this ambrosia in! She already feels engorged! As more and more of the American populace begin to mourn the loss of their youthful leader, Cassandra does her very best to gulp down the fast-flowing rivers of their collective sorrow...

...but she feels like she's choking! She feels like she’s going to drown in all this tribulation!

She wonders how much grief she will be able to swallow before she ultimately EXPLODES!

⚡______________________⚡

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