9. Between Nothing and the Impossible End

Glittering light that did not belong to gravity but some other present wordless dimension moved over the horizon about her and through her bones and her cells and the particles thick & thin within her blood tumbled out, away as if given by some earthly obligation to a fate she wasn't permitted to decide. "That's her." She felt cold but did not shiver, did not experience discomfort, her breath still echoing through her heart and her lungs. "Gee, ya think." And even some trace of their voices could be discerned. "Whatever. Get the legs." The exterior world was hollow, yet of a substance that reverberated from its core into the outer tangible. "Lift." And she knew who she was, her memories quite preserved in that final challenge. She knew it was the city, nothing else, not some distant place in a distance unknowable to humans. 

Two doors pulled closed. And an odor antiseptic, white, pure, docile. The momentum of being drawn away from the feet, balanced sensation in her shoulders, her scapula. "We're coming in." Her chest rose and in her stomach another kind of transparency announced itself, as though liberated from a cage that was never a cage. 

The attendants observed her with dull detachment; she was hardly more than ice, or furniture. One on either side, seated on benches as the ambulance hurried down Wilkinson Boulevard, beyond even Auster and Platinum. Traffic strangely sparse, the early-morning streets red and quiet, imbuing the parked cars that lined the route with a sense of greeting and good will as they journeyed to the hospital. 

A flavorless memory of coffee was hers, she let it stay there, and that good man whose ring she yet wore stunted in neutrality, dumbfounded, loving, regardless how incapable he'd been rendered in the course of history, he was there in those inundating flashes of thought. 

She could feel the ambulance slow, then turn, then ascend up a hill, hearing them making banal conversation as the vehicle came to the entrance of the emergency ward. 

And the two doors opened, and she was lifted with the stretcher, and they set it on the ground, and they rolled her into the hospital. 

More talk from the attendants, the voice of a female nurse, softly, softly, they moved her down a hall and into a room. 

Light from the ceiling gave her attention some company, and then for just a fleeting instant she considered there might be a world after this one, some place like Paradise, or endless tranquility. 

But, of course, there was not. Their divorce had never been any more formal than their marriage, so that in the following twelve hours, God would become a widow. 

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