Short Story: Slaying the Demons

 A short story to play on George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant.”

Note: This is what it feels like to drown in grief from the past, depression, and an uncertain future. 

    A wrecked nervous system residing in a body scarred from war resembles the shambles of a home burned in the most extreme house fire the block had ever seen. Initially, it was sad to hear about the things that happened there, but the fire was put out, and the crew came in to clear the debris months later and assess the damage so the inhabitants could restart their lives. It’s a sense of calm at first when the blackened walls are torn down and replaced with fresh sheetrock and plaster. The home slab passed muster, but still, there was something unsound about something that didn’t crack under extreme heat and pressure. The walls are quickly built, the roof secured on top, shingle by shingle and brick by brick; you spend the energy rebuilding your life. You make it better, or so you hope, and continue to the finish line of that disaster.
    You enjoy the battle behind you as you cross the new threshold, sweep pristine floors of sawdust, and the fears you left littered from the past all across the kitchen floor. The echo of the new halls is still haunted by ghosts from before, but the clean paint hides the writing once on the walls. The bodies in the basement still scream from below as the imagined flames lept at their bony toes.
    With smiles slanted across your face, the plaster that held it together cracks under pressure, hidden by fancy bricks and new, clean paint starting to bead with droplets of blood.
    In the early hours, the shadows taunt you, haunting you from the upgraded windowsills, scratching at the door frames, and moving your belongings to think you’ve lost your mind.
    But you have; you had always been lost.
    You put in the work, cleared the bad, and painted over the unsightly scars on cracking walls as the ghost insists on being seen, even though your unsightly gaze stares up at the weeping ceiling threatening to collapse above you. Even with the façade neatly presented, the inside still holds the scars of the past, and the funny thing about the past is that it’s never really just in the past. Rarely does it leave on vacation to give you a break; no, it stays. It lingers, holding your hand and one over your mouth to scream so no one else can hear you being held captive. The bodies will drag you down, the ghosts of loved ones repeating things you try to forget, haunting your days and nights, holding candles to the parts of you, you wished didn’t exist.
    The neighbors coo inside houses free of the burns of the past, how they should have been more grateful, more fastidious about the rebuild, that the reason for yet another destruction was from clearly holding onto the past disaster and not moving on fast enough not to be seen as a victim of poor circumstance. No, it’s your fault that you are back in the shambles of crumbling walls and sad ceilings and gripping the sagging banister for just the slightest bit of support, all the while others point and stare at the spectacle you make of yourself.
    “Help,” you say, but they look the other way and say you didn’t try as the concrete slab begins to cave in from air pockets of past regrets and damage done under the gray skin. The dust it crumbles to pulls your weary legs in like quicksand, threatening to eat the past, the future, and even yourself. You can no longer see the lights as they shut off long ago from rusting wiring and disintegrating under the pressures of standing upright without bending to the wills of the ghosts and joists bending in a release.
    As your fingers tighten on the last rung of the stares, you stare up into the darkness above, hoping for just a spark of anything, even a fire right now, to do anything to make you feel the way you felt before the past burned you to the ground. But the concrete doesn’t give up, clawing and gripping until the force of thousands of pounds comes toppling in on you and your thoughts of the future you calmed yourself when you painted over the past.
    You knew there was no saving this house, but you tried anyway, even without the help of those close by and the bitter, if not disillusioned, murmurs of those who used to hope for better. Once the fires burned you to the ground, they stood by and watched the spectacle until the fire was put out. But as you crumble in on yourself, no fire to be seen, those neighbors wonder why you still live in those ashes when everything was okay from what they could see.
    You burn, coals in the ashes of the past, too dirty to grasp for the future so out of reach.