Life Goes On

The smell of bleach and sanitizer that had so often churned David's stomach had its potency expelled at the cost of an immeasurable heartache.

Vision blurry, he stumbled towards a light, a sliver from an imperfect alignment in the tinted automatic doors ahead. In his periphery, a cleaner mopped the sheet-vinyl floor with a monotonous pattern. Just business as usual to everyone outside his skin.

Once outside, from the labyrinth that was the hospital and into the lesser stale air. The blur that once clouded the man's eyes dispersed. He’d not long witnessed life’s slow march to the bitter end unfold before him, and there was only silence for the encore.

In a panic, David reached into his pockets. He fumbled like a lost child through tear-soaked tissue lint, crumbled up tickets and found a lone cigarette. He perched the two-toned cancer stick between his cracked lips within a couple of heart beats. And searched his breast pocket for a lighter, however, another cold metallic sensation stopped him still.

"Did you bring it?" a voice echoed in the man’s mind. Words spoken only yesterday, a male tone. Old and frail, clinging to the last threads of life.

David removed a medal from his jacket, almost pristine. It was his fathers, a symbol of courage, and reflected a life well lived. He brought it today, to deliver on a promise, only death outpaced these good intentions.

“Is this it? Life just ends?” David murmured to himself.

Suddenly David’s cell phone tone rang out, he answered with a lump in his throat and heard sobbing. It sounded different to the calamity of sadness that roared inside his chest.

A soft cracked voice announced, “Dad, I’m pregnant, can you believe it?!”

David thought to himself “Maybe there is so much more to this…”