Agony

An emergency 911 call in the middle of the night started a series of events that plunged the joy of pregnancy into a dark hour of tragedy for Erasmus, Florentine, and unborn baby Elijah.

An ambulance arrived in record time and rushed the family to the hospital at breakneck speed. One medic drove while the other applied CPR to the unconscious Florentine. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Erasmus feverishly rubbed the blue tips of his wife’s fingers and toes to aid blood circulation.

Before they reached the hospital, Florentine gave birth to a stillborn baby Elijah before taking her last breath on her twenty-fourth birthday. Erasmus’ heart sank and his stomach churned when his wife’s body heaved and sagged into lifelessness. Shock numbed him for a moment before he registered the horror that had befallen him and his family.

Through streaming tears that blurred his vision, Erasmus placed his lifeless baby boy on his wife’s chest and hugged them with howls of anguish. The attendant who administered the CPR gave the family space to have their last embrace. Erasmus’ body jerked with uncontrollable sobs. He alternated kisses between his wife and baby and pleaded with them in desperation to return to him.   

Exhaustion from the ordeal of the night left Erasmus weak and tired. He stretched across two chairs and slept in the hospital’s waiting room while the hospital prepared the death certificates and took the bodies to the morgue.

After a private funeral, Erasmus laid his family to rest at the local cemetery in a single casket. Tiny Elijah rested face down on his mother’s chest with her arms around him.

The shock of his double loss sent Erasmus headlong into a deep depression, which forced him to quit his job. Life without his family held no purpose. Dark moods replaced his usual sunny personality. He considered his missing cell phone a blessing since it cut off communication with the outside world. He started to spend entire days at the cemetery with his family. Telepathic communication allowed him to speak with Florentine in the grave, who gave him updates on her and Elijah’s wellbeing.

On the third night after their burial, Elijah tossed around in his bed, unable to fall asleep. He bundled his blanket and pillow and rode his bicycle to the cemetery in the middle of the night to sleep on top of their grave. He lay on the bare earth to feel their closeness and enjoy the comfort of their virtual hugs. The peacefulness of the graveyard and family unity brought pleasant dreams in deep rests of contentment.

Erasmus awoke before the birds the next morning to return home for a shower and fresh clothes. At sunup, he packed breakfast, lunch, and dinner for another full day with the ones who left him in life but remained alive to him in death.

To get closer to his family at night, he scooped a two-foot deep body-length trough in the soft earth with his fingers to sink himself lower into the grave. The morning after, he bundled his pillow and blanket into his backpack and used his palms to shuffle the displaced earth back into the hole.

After the first week, Erasmus bought a shovel small enough to fit into his backpack and continued to dig the grave deeper each night until he reached a depth of four feet. The security of knowing that his family slept within two feet each night gave him lucid dreams filled with nostalgic memories. He used the shovel to fill his sleeping hollow each morning before going home to prepare picnic meals for time spent with his family during daylight.  

One night, pouring rain almost drowned him when it filled the trench in which he slept. He stood up to rise above the water’s level to breathe, but his feet sank through the soft mud until it came to rest on the casket’s cover. Erasmus tiptoed to get his nose above the water. He had to close his eyes to keep out the spattering muddy water while he used his hands to push the water out of the hole.

When the water level dropped to his chest, the wall of the hole collapsed inward, trapping him under its weight. Fear of slipping off the casket and drowning in the mud forced him to stand still until daybreak. Each time he exhaled, the mud around his chest tightened, making chest expansion to inhale life-giving air excruciatingly painful.

At daybreak, Erasmus heard voices and tried to scream but his deflated lungs only allowed short breaths of survival. He did not have enough energy to splash the water to attract attention. His prayers were answered when cemetery staff discovered him and used ropes and a backhoe to lift him out of his plight. He swallowed lungfuls of air as he dangled above the ground wearing only one shoe. An ambulance carted off the scared, shivering, and hungry Erasmus to the hospital, where he concocted a story of getting lost in the cemetery while intoxicated. The hospital staff chuckled. It was a familiar story that they had heard a thousand times.

Before leaving the hospital, Erasmus asked the staff if they had seen his wallet. They said he had been admitted without it. After his discharge, he searched his residence but could not find it. He had to return to the grave to retrieve his identification documents, credit cards, and cash.  

Armed with his shovel hidden in the backpack, he returned to the cemetery but freshly dug graves all around without identification tags made locating his family’s grave impossible. The cemetery’s office had no record of burying a mother and her baby named Florentine and Elijah.

Erasmus returned home dejected and worried with questions about his sanity. Had he imagined having a family? Clothing and personal possessions at home showed him living alone.

Disturbing events one year later sent him back to the brink of insanity. At midnight of the shared date of birth of Florentine and Elijah, Erasmus jumped out of sleep from a loud thump on his front door. He listened for a moment, but silence followed. Blaming the incident on a bad dream, he rolled around for an hour before falling asleep once more.

The next morning, he opened the door and grabbed his throat to suppress a yelp. He stared at his missing muddy shoes on the ground outside his door. Someone had scrawled the word, ‘birthday’, in the mud on the side of each shoe.

Erasmus slammed the door shut and locked it. He retreated to the bedroom and softly closed the door behind him. Without making a sound, he tiptoed to the bed and crawled under the covers. Frozen with fear, he tried to slow his breathing and strained his ears to listen for unusual sounds but dead silence filled the air.

  His blood turned cold a few moments later when his cell phone’s loud ring from the kitchen echoed around the home. The incessant ringing grew closer and louder until it reached the bedroom door.

After a heart-stopping thud against the door, the phone fell to the floor. It slid under the door and along the floor before stopping near the bed, displaying a bright pink and blue birthday cake.

Erasmus’ stomach flipped when the ring tone changed to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday,’ with lit candles, streamers, and graffiti animating the screen.

The phone’s display changed to show a pregnant Florentine’s twisted and broken body twitching on the road. Erasmus retched when his empty stomach convulsed.

After a few seconds, the screen advanced to the scene in the ambulance, with the stillborn baby on his dead mother’s stomach. Erasmus was not in the picture.

A brief window of reality flashed in his memory of that fateful night. His mind had snapped from guilt at the scene of the carnage he had created when he had texted while driving. He had plowed into the bus stop where Florentine had waited to board a bus for a fetal health checkup at the hospital.

In his haste to escape punishment, he had fled the scene and locked his car in the garage to hide the damage caused by the accident.

Guilt made Erasmus surrender to the authorities. He told his story, which included his visits to the gravesite. Cemetery staff and cameras verified his narrative.

After ordering an evaluation report, a judge sent Erasmus to a psychiatric ward where the recurring nightmare of the shoes at the door and the cell phone’s images made him scream every time he fell asleep. His subconscious attempts to seek security and comfort from the other patients by climbing into their beds resulted in isolation. He was placed in a padded cell to muffle his heart-rending screams and slamming into the walls to escape his bad dreams.

The shock of his actions had forced his conscience to adopt Florentine and Elijah as his close-knit family to suffer the imprisonment of torturous grief at their loss every moment for the rest of his life. Sleep offered no reprieve from the delusion of belonging to the family he never had.