Marcelle
BIO: Marcelle Cooper majored in Journalism at Easter Michigan University. He is a gifted author who specializes in fantasy novels,literary critism, academic editing and essay and academic writing, but has also written award-winning short stories and Christian Apologetic articles. He has been praised boundless imagination and unforgettable characters. Marcelle has also been responsible for critiquing and editing dozens for short stories and novel treatments. Marcelle's published work can be found on-line.
The Artist in the Ambulance
My world is black. I am swimming in darkness, drifting into the nonentity that waits at the invisible edge of the abyss. I hear voices, warped as if I’m hearing them from underwater. They sound far away, but I know they are not. They are right here, swimming with me through my black world.
They have come to save me, but they cannot reach me. The darkness is too heavy. As it weighs in on me, the voices become less distinct until they are reduced to soft white noise. I sink deeper into the ocean of blackness. It is swallowing my soul. I try to call to the voices for help, but they cannot hear me. I cannot hear me. I have no voice. No mouth. No body. I am nothing. I am a vapor sinking into an even deeper nothingness. Total nothing. Total darkness. It is crushing, becoming heavier every moment until, suddenly, it becomes less heavy. The smothering, bodiless pressure wanes. The darkness remains profound, and yet it feels less void.
The voices return. I only hear one of them clearly.
“He’s stabilizing.”
What does that mean? Stabilizing? The darkness reechoes the word.
Stabilizing…stabilizing…stabilizing…
As the world pulses, the black of my world becomes less black until it is no longer black, but a deep, dark grey. I am moving now, upward. Not swimming or floating, but flying. I am being pulled. Something is lifting me from the abyss through a spectrum of deep greys that swiftly become opaque, then pale. Finally, grey becomes white. It grows brighter. If floods my whole world until it stings. The brightness sears my whole body. Slowly in recedes like the waning tide. It only stings my eyes now. This white is not the world. It is a light. As my senses return to me, I realize it is a florescent light bulb attached to a metallic ceiling. The ceiling has been painted white. I’m not flying anymore. I am lying on my back. Several monitors whirl and pulse beside me.
“Where am I?”
That is what I try to say, but there is a rubber mask clasped around my face, feeding me fresh oxygen.
A face appears over me. It is that of a middle-aged man with close-cropped grey hair. He is wearing a blue uniform. He must be a police officer.
Slam! Slam!
Two doors shut behind me in succession. A piercing scream blares from the cleaning and the whole room rocks slightly and a steady, ever-so-gentle vibration follows.
I’m in an ambulance, I realize. The man floats over my head for a moment, and then vanishes again. He isn’t a cop. He’s a paramedic.
Of course, I remember. I was hurt. My memory returns in a flurry of images. There’s darkness, rain, dim streetlights, and wet asphalt. There’s a red traffic light and…my breaks locking. Horns blaring as I skid into the intersection. Then there’s the SUV barreling at me like a monster, the LED headlights blinding me, the blast of its horn deafening me. And then my world is black.
The paramedic is back. He is doing something to the gurney I’m lying on, but I cannot tell what. He eclipses the light bulb and the light forms an arch around his head. He looks like one of those angels from the old paintings. It seemed fitting. I saw no other paramedics, so could only assume this man had saved my life. He was a guardian angel of sorts, the angel that lifted me from the unending darkness of death. It’s so strange. He saved me and I don’t even know his name. I’ve never even seem him before.
I owe my life to a stranger.
I try again to speak to him, but find that I am too weak and I am still wearing the oxygen mask. Even if I could speak, I think, what would I have said? ‘Thank you’? I said that yesterday to a guy who gave me a stick of Doublemint. Do I really dare offer the same thing to the person who saved my life.
I cycle through millions of things to say. I realize a long time before finishing that anything I say, no matter how sincere, is ultimately empty. My debt to this stranger is one that can never be repaid.
Someone speaks, but I am not sure whether or not it is to me. I only make out half the sentence over the machinery.
“…wife will meet us…”
Is my wife coming to see me? It is now that I remember the reason I was driving in the first place. My wife had asked me to pick up some groceries. I forgot the eggs. I promised I wouldn’t forget the eggs. She won’t think about that when she sees me. I wonder if she would have thought about it if I had died. Would my wife have noticed that the last thing I ever did was brake a promise to her?
How ironic. Breaking that little promise seems so enormous now that I’m shaking on a stretcher, half-alive on my way to the hospital. Yet it would have been trivial had I gotten home in perfect health. At least, it would have been trivial to me. My wife would have been furious. And I would have been furious at her for being furious at me. I really would have gotten mad at her for being disappointed that I had broken yet another promise. Man, that’s stupid.
How often did I do things like that? How many promises had I shrugged off because they weren’t a ‘big deal’ to me. How many people had I disappointed? How many lives did I negatively affect with my little white lies, and actions that ‘won’t hurt anyone’? How many ‘one time things’ and ‘one time things’ had I ended up doing many times because it was convenient for me, even if not for anyone else. Was this what I would have left behind, had I not been saved?
This was my legacy; a lifetime of white lies, shortcuts, and forgotten eggs. I look up at the paramedic. This is the man you saved. This ambulance could have been anywhere tonight. You could have been out reviving someone who was worth the effort. Someone who didn’t just exist, but made his existence meaningful by affecting others.
I long now more than ever to speak. I want to ask, “why me?” Why bring back the life that made no difference? I want to ask, but I am struck once more by the unutterable meaninglessness of any answer he might give. I am here now. The reason doesn’t matter. I have been granted a second chance to become a man worth remembering.
I can stop talking about sacrifice and honesty. I can embody them. I can stop calling treachery names like ‘one time thing’ and ‘desperate measures’, and stop thinking the excuse that I’m ‘not hurting anyone’ is good enough for every heinous act I can think of. I can stop pretending I’m generous when the truth is I’m just having a good day.
For the last time, the paramedic appears. The two doors behind me open as if to release the new me into the world. As I am hoisted and wheeled away from the ambulance that changed my life, I take one last look at the man who saved me. You don’t know me. But if you did, you would expect to see me change. I may never see you again, but I hope that I will never let you down.
The Artist in the Ambulance
My world is black. I am swimming in darkness, drifting into the nonentity that waits at the invisible edge of the abyss. I hear voices, warped as if I’m hearing them from underwater. They sound far away, but I know they are not. They are right here, swimming with me through my black world.
They have come to save me, but they cannot reach me. The darkness is too heavy. As it weighs in on me, the voices become less distinct until they are reduced to soft white noise. I sink deeper into the ocean of blackness. It is swallowing my soul. I try to call to the voices for help, but they cannot hear me. I cannot hear me. I have no voice. No mouth. No body. I am nothing. I am a vapor sinking into an even deeper nothingness. Total nothing. Total darkness. It is crushing, becoming heavier every moment until, suddenly, it becomes less heavy. The smothering, bodiless pressure wanes. The darkness remains profound, and yet it feels less void.
The voices return. I only hear one of them clearly.
“He’s stabilizing.”
What does that mean? Stabilizing? The darkness reechoes the word.
Stabilizing…stabilizing…stabilizing…
As the world pulses, the black of my world becomes less black until it is no longer black, but a deep, dark grey. I am moving now, upward. Not swimming or floating, but flying. I am being pulled. Something is lifting me from the abyss through a spectrum of deep greys that swiftly become opaque, then pale. Finally, grey becomes white. It grows brighter. If floods my whole world until it stings. The brightness sears my whole body. Slowly in recedes like the waning tide. It only stings my eyes now. This white is not the world. It is a light. As my senses return to me, I realize it is a florescent light bulb attached to a metallic ceiling. The ceiling has been painted white. I’m not flying anymore. I am lying on my back. Several monitors whirl and pulse beside me.
“Where am I?”
That is what I try to say, but there is a rubber mask clasped around my face, feeding me fresh oxygen.
A face appears over me. It is that of a middle-aged man with close-cropped grey hair. He is wearing a blue uniform. He must be a police officer.
Slam! Slam!
Two doors shut behind me in succession. A piercing scream blares from the cleaning and the whole room rocks slightly and a steady, ever-so-gentle vibration follows.
I’m in an ambulance, I realize. The man floats over my head for a moment, and then vanishes again. He isn’t a cop. He’s a paramedic.
Of course, I remember. I was hurt. My memory returns in a flurry of images. There’s darkness, rain, dim streetlights, and wet asphalt. There’s a red traffic light and…my breaks locking. Horns blaring as I skid into the intersection. Then there’s the SUV barreling at me like a monster, the LED headlights blinding me, the blast of its horn deafening me. And then my world is black.
The paramedic is back. He is doing something to the gurney I’m lying on, but I cannot tell what. He eclipses the light bulb and the light forms an arch around his head. He looks like one of those angels from the old paintings. It seemed fitting. I saw no other paramedics, so could only assume this man had saved my life. He was a guardian angel of sorts, the angel that lifted me from the unending darkness of death. It’s so strange. He saved me and I don’t even know his name. I’ve never even seem him before.
I owe my life to a stranger.
I try again to speak to him, but find that I am too weak and I am still wearing the oxygen mask. Even if I could speak, I think, what would I have said? ‘Thank you’? I said that yesterday to a guy who gave me a stick of Doublemint. Do I really dare offer the same thing to the person who saved my life.
I cycle through millions of things to say. I realize a long time before finishing that anything I say, no matter how sincere, is ultimately empty. My debt to this stranger is one that can never be repaid.
Someone speaks, but I am not sure whether or not it is to me. I only make out half the sentence over the machinery.
“…wife will meet us…”
Is my wife coming to see me? It is now that I remember the reason I was driving in the first place. My wife had asked me to pick up some groceries. I forgot the eggs. I promised I wouldn’t forget the eggs. She won’t think about that when she sees me. I wonder if she would have thought about it if I had died. Would my wife have noticed that the last thing I ever did was brake a promise to her?
How ironic. Breaking that little promise seems so enormous now that I’m shaking on a stretcher, half-alive on my way to the hospital. Yet it would have been trivial had I gotten home in perfect health. At least, it would have been trivial to me. My wife would have been furious. And I would have been furious at her for being furious at me. I really would have gotten mad at her for being disappointed that I had broken yet another promise. Man, that’s stupid.
How often did I do things like that? How many promises had I shrugged off because they weren’t a ‘big deal’ to me. How many people had I disappointed? How many lives did I negatively affect with my little white lies, and actions that ‘won’t hurt anyone’? How many ‘one time things’ and ‘one time things’ had I ended up doing many times because it was convenient for me, even if not for anyone else. Was this what I would have left behind, had I not been saved?
This was my legacy; a lifetime of white lies, shortcuts, and forgotten eggs. I look up at the paramedic. This is the man you saved. This ambulance could have been anywhere tonight. You could have been out reviving someone who was worth the effort. Someone who didn’t just exist, but made his existence meaningful by affecting others.
I long now more than ever to speak. I want to ask, “why me?” Why bring back the life that made no difference? I want to ask, but I am struck once more by the unutterable meaninglessness of any answer he might give. I am here now. The reason doesn’t matter. I have been granted a second chance to become a man worth remembering.
I can stop talking about sacrifice and honesty. I can embody them. I can stop calling treachery names like ‘one time thing’ and ‘desperate measures’, and stop thinking the excuse that I’m ‘not hurting anyone’ is good enough for every heinous act I can think of. I can stop pretending I’m generous when the truth is I’m just having a good day.
For the last time, the paramedic appears. The two doors behind me open as if to release the new me into the world. As I am hoisted and wheeled away from the ambulance that changed my life, I take one last look at the man who saved me. You don’t know me. But if you did, you would expect to see me change. I may never see you again, but I hope that I will never let you down.