Stephen N. Dethrage is a rising sophomore at  the University of Alabama. His major is Journalism, and his minor is  Creative Writing. This is his first submission to a literary  publication. On campus, his work has been nominated for the  Thomas Wolfe Award for overall best Undergraduate Creative Writing, and the  Don Hendrie, Jr Award for Fiction. As is often the case, without the love  and encouragement of family, friends, professors and a lover, he would be  nothing.

Life After Love (June 20, 2010. Issue 18.)

I’ll never know what exactly caused the accident. The investigators at the scene told me that more than once. Perhaps she fell asleep at the wheel, or maybe swerved to avoid taking the life of some creature that darted across the road at precisely the wrong moment. Drowsiness or distraction… her killer could never be determined, the cops assured me, and speculation didn’t help anyone. The coroner, however, was not as merciful. His details were exact, precise, unfiltered. Carmen, somehow or another, lost control of the vehicle. At that point, she careened off of the highway and collided head on with a tree, which broke her spine and paralyzed her instantly. Momentum kept the car moving, until at last it slipped over the edge of a small bank off the road and landed upside down in the creek below. The water therein wasn’t high, and it didn’t move quickly. It was a slow, steady stream that might have taken hours to slide over the broken glass of the car’s window and begin to fill the vehicle with exaggerated leisure.

Ultimately though, it reached her, and found her upside down, strapped in and paralyzed. The water filled her lungs, and unable to move, she drowned to death after hours of agony in the wreckage. These were the details of my lover’s death, and no matter how I might try, I couldn’t wake from the nightmare that had suddenly become reality.

The funeral was a robotic experience for me, like I’d been put on autopilot. I shook hands and shed tears and hugged those who thought it would comfort me to some degree or another, but I felt more like a remote observer than the ragged man actually going through the motions of the mourning. I couldn’t stay focused on the elaborate eulogy or the memorializing slideshow that tried in vain to embody the twenty-four years of life lived by a beautiful, carefree girl in three minutes. Instead, my mind created a slideshow of its own, recalling the years I’d spent loving the girl in the casket and the countless moments of undiluted happiness that refused to die with her. I remembered how we sang shamelessly in the car, now totalled, now flooded. We played constantly with our cat, Clint, named jokingly after our favorite actor. Most importantly, we loved each other passionately, and nothing made either of us quite as happy as losing ourselves in the arms of each other. A blast of noise from the organ brought me back to the service, and it struck me that those things were never going to happen again. They were irrevocably translated to the past tense, like cheap souvenirs of the vacation from life that was our romance. Now, I was expected to mourn for the appropriate little while, then just get back to living, as if life still had value without the privelege of waking to her smile each morning.

After the funeral, in our house that was suddeny a cold, lonely place, I wandered aimlessly stopping only to touch a jacket of hers, or her pillows, or the photos of us on the Pacific coast. These things, connections to her, I fingered absent-mindedly, and asked myself over and over again how someone recovers from a loss so tragic. Hours later, as the afternoon lazily marched towards its end, while others wondered what might be for dinner, I wondered silently how people could bear life after love. In the bedroom, lost in my thoughts and in her jewelry box, my eyes fell for just a moment to the butt of my revolver, lying harmlessly on my nightstand, as it had for years, and suddenly the answer struck me with strange, terrifying surety. People didn’t recover from pain like this. Suddenly, I recalled the star-crossed lover in Verona facing the body of his beloved, and there was only one real option.

I took the revolver and crammed it unceremoniously into my waistband. After one last glance at the picture of our wedding on her dresser, I turned away from the room full of her smells, her clothes and her memory and made my way to the car. Zynn Park housed so many beautiful moments in my life with her, and I found myself driving there almost from muscle memory. Half an hour later, the car was parked, and I shambled like the undead, with purpose but lacking drive and energy, closing the distance slowly between myself and the massive oak in the northeast corner of the park. There, I stood against the tree for a moment and allowed a single tear to trace its path down my cheek before sliding down and sitting there on the roots, a man defeated.

I felt the grip of the revolver press tightly into the small of my back, and in a moment of sudden clarity, it struck me that I had come to this spot, under this tree, in this crowded park, to kill myself. I acknowledged that public suicide was a messy thing, but God or Allah or whoever the hell was in charge around here hadn't been concerned about the unintended consequences of messy things four nights ago as the water found its way into Carmen's lungs, and as I sat beneath the tree, I found that I wasn't all that worried about those consequences, either. My decision was final. This tree was the place, and the people that filled the park would just have to deal with it. In the shade of the colossal oak tree, I gathered what I knew would be my final thoughts.

The days since Carmen's death had been a never-ending maelstrom of pain and sadness, Each time I heard my wife's sweet name, I forgot it all momentarily, and was filled with delight and hope at the idea of her angelic face in my vision again, only to be crushed moments after by the realization that her blushing cheeks were cold and pale, and her mesmerizing amber eyes were closed now with permanence. Today, as they buried her, and the casket echoed the sounds of the first shovel of dirt, I found myself wondering if I could ever love again. As soon as I considered it, though, I knew the answer damn well. The word “love” had only one association in my mind, and she was under the ground now, in her ornate coffin, dead and alone in some place where I could not reach her.

I was alone too, with wave after wave of a sadness more powerful than I ever imagined possible. With no one to blame, my depression couldn't be molded into some fiery anger that would eventually burn itself out, or explode in an act of bloody vengeance. Instead, my Carmen died in a single-car accident. There was no drunk driver to abhor for his carelessness, no friend with a cell phone who distracted her, no mechanical issues that took control from her that night-- there was no explanation. No comfort. No condolence. There was nothing at all, save the cold reality her death and a dark sadness, my only constant companion since her death.

I was left in complete solitude, and understood that just moving past this loss wasn't an option. Without love, why try? Why live? It was this question that permeated deeper and further into my mind, until finally, after the bleak ceremony, after the tears and sobs and fights for composure, I found myself here, still wearing the ominous black uniform of the funeral of my wife.

I sighed and began to reach for the gun when the first of an assembling group passed right beside me, without a word. He marched forward, past me, to some unseen destination, with something long and slender zipped up in a soft black case that was slung carelessly over his shoulder. Immediately after I took notice of him, more and more of them appeared from all around the park. Dozens of them came together in a group, each with his own instrument, and formed a long line that was almost directly in front of the oak tree under which I was seated.

They began preparing their tools, one by one. Some of them, like the first, merely unzipped a carrying case and took their implements out into the open air with a sort of sacred reverence. Others unpacked theirs in many pieces and carefully assembled them, part by part, with loving care. My interest was piqued by the sudden mob, and I paid careful attention to their goings-on, and realized that each member was unpacking or assembling long fly-fishing rods, each one nearly taller than the person who carried it. Their apparent leader stepped in front of the line carrying a black duffel bag, then turned to face them all. From the duffel, he produced roll after roll of vividly colored strings, which he tossed to everyone before him. Each member lined their poles with differently shaded strings, and after a short time, the group before me was universally armed with rods and reels that boasted a wide variety of colors that stood out in blatant defiance of the vast skies of sunset and green trees of the park.

After the preparations finished, their leader gave his horde the slightest of nods, and each of them, in perfect sync, cast his rod forward in the open area the park provided. They whipped their poles back and forth in the carefully mastered motion of fly-fishing, and each string flew in colorful arches, resembling a majestic mobile rainbow that stretched from end to end of the line of people. Their leader watched the casts with a cold, calculating gaze, and barked corrections in technique to any member of the class whose string faltered.

I was taken by surprise at the splendor of the precision of the exercise. Each carefully calculated cast and snapping back of the fishing poles truly fascinated me. My eyes took in each neon string as it accented the slowly fading sunlight that painted the sky in scarlet hues. The blues and greens and yellows and whites that whipped through the air brought tears to my eyes that I couldn't explain, and for fifteen flawlessly gorgeous minutes, my misty vision never wavered from the group standing before me, and the spectrum of colors they cast across the space between the oak tree and their group.

My first conscious thought was that Carmen would love the sight of them. My second thought corrected the first, and regulated it to the past tense. Carmen would have loved it. My third thought, as my hand snaked under my jacket and brought the gun out of hiding, was mild curiosity at whether or not their exercise would continue after I was gone. At this, I jammed the short barrel of my revolver under my chin, just like I'd pictured myself doing, and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell, the powder lit, and everything went exactly as planned.