A Trail of Ashes
Can consciousness conceive of something outside its own conception? This was just one of the questions that Maple Reeveport was discussing with herself as she strolled through an empty park. As she walked and smoked a cigarette, her blonde bangs rested lightly on the frames of her oversized dark sunglasses.
Her pink vinyl mini skirt swayed gently as each hip moved side to side. The squirrels and chipmunks barely noted her journey through their territory. What forms do thoughts take? What should I make of this thought or that? Thoughts of an unsettling existential variety came and went as the morning dew returns to the Sun at dusk.
Her slow descent from the rolling green hill was marked by a trail of ashes. Maple made it to a depression in the earth and laid flat on her back. She let her cigarette go out on the grass as her arms stretched out side to side. Her hair parted neatly down the middle as she stared into the gray clouds. Time slipped gently away from Maple. Her eyelids fluttered and then closed.
She waited for the sweet relief of darkness. Refraining from her resistance to the opiate of sleep she gently fell into the black void….
Light conversation intermingled with images of yesterday and people from tomorrow….
While losing awareness of her position on the grass, Maple drew a sharp gasp of air as if she had almost drowned. Her eyes burst open. White light illuminated the blue tiled room. The glare from her clear plastic goggles refracted the tiled floor into strange patterns.
She became aware of her left hand. In her left palm gently rested a pair of bent stainless steel scissors. She noticed the red blood that had coagulated on her blue vinyl gloves. She looked right to see an open-chested body on an operating table. Nurses and doctors, beeps and whizzes became all the more lucid and clear.
“Hey! Are you good?” a nurse asked her.
“Yeah, I’m fine, just zoned out for a sec,” she replied.
“Hey Maple, her left ventricle is tearing, we need stitches ASAP!” a surgeon shouted.
She stepped quickly to the operating table, grabbing the suture off the tool stand, she rolled out enough and threaded the needle.
“Hurry up Maple!” the surgeon shouted.
She punctured the pinkish-gray muscle of the heart as the suture followed the needle. Three quick moves and the stitches were complete.
“I’m…done, I’m done,” she murmured to the surgeon.
Maple dropped the needle on the tool stand and stepped back. The shrieks and whines of the machines made her feel dizzy. Unable to process it all, her head fell to floor as she stared blankly.
The alarm on the cardio-graph went berserk.
“We have a code three, the ventricle reopened!” a nurse shouted.
The team of doctors and nurses swarmed over the body. Maple looked up and saw them covering the spurting stream of blood with their hands. She moved closer to the table as she became dizzier.
Maple collapsed to the floor with a thump.
“10:52 time of death,” the surgeon reported….
***
WHITE LIGHT enveloped and penetrated Maple’s dark sunglasses. The mounds beneath eyelids scurried rapidly. Her chest contorted upwards in contraction as she grasped sharply for air. Unable to inhale she dropped breathlessly onto the soft green grass. A gentle breeze blew the ashes of her cigarette across her body.
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