This is a story I wrote not too long ago, based off of a dream I had that was, to say the least, quite surreal. In the dream I was first the wife, then the husband. It went on to include pirates and pirate ships and at one point a rollercoaster, but I left that out. Warning: it's really depressing.
Wife and Child
The war had started before we were married. But that summer after the ceremony, when he turned eighteen and I was still seventeen, he was shipped out, to fight for his country in a war we personally had no stake in.
I remember it being a war over spices, or some nonsense like that. Someone was offended that someone else wanted more money for their goods, so we took up arms and set out to show them we were better than them, and deserved their spices (or whatever it was) more than they deserved the right to charge what they wanted for their product and labor.
Two months in, a period late, and the town doctor diagnosed me as pregnant. I wept torrents, both happy and sad as my young husband wasn’t there to share in the pain and joy. My mother hired a kind older woman to help take care of me and do what I would be unable to, as my husband was off to war and I would soon be heavy with his child. My hand shook as I wrote my husband, unable to contain the fear and elation that our bloodline would carry on.
The soldiers were just outside. I ran to the baby’s bedroom, and screamed in horror. A stray bullet had come in through the window and taken her while she slept. I turned to flee, and the door was knocked down. I backed up, holding my hands out, and pleaded for my life. With no show of mercy, he pulled the trigger twice. The first shot took me in the stomach. The second hit my heart. I held my hands up to my husband as I slipped to the floor dying, so he could hold me one last time.
The letter I received was full of joy. She was pregnant with my child. I wept with joy, overcome with so many emotions it was hard to think to name them all. Once this war was over, I would be able to go home to a family I could call my own.
I waited in line for the train, wondering why I heard the ocean and smelled the breeze. There was no ocean I could see, only the crush of men waiting to go home. It wasn’t until I passed a man missing part of his face, walking just as I was walking, that I looked down. A large hole was in my stomach, oozing a small amount of blood. I was dead, it seemed. Large tears dripped down my face as I mourned for my wife and child I would never see, when someone pulled me aside. My wound was not that of the others, he seemed to tell me. If I would just go and take another train, and not the one to death and beyond, I had a chance to go back to my family. Eager, I accepted, and followed him down underneath the train station, ripe with the smell and sound of the ocean, to one much darker. Hear the rushing sound of water was everywhere, so loud I could barely make out my guide’s voice. The train whistle blew, cutting through the sound of the rushing water, and he pushed me into an opening that had started to move. He yelled something, but between the crushing sound of water and the whistle, I couldn’t make out what he said.
I took my seat in a nearly empty train and waited, nervous. The train plunged into the water, which rushed into the cab through the open windows, and kept going along the track. I yelled out in horror and tried to escape, but the force of the water was too much and I was pushed back. Water quickly filled the cab and took my breath away with its crushing force. I sucked in a lungful of water and blacked out.
I awoke on my back porch to the sound of gunfire and screams. It seemed the war had reached here after all. Soaked to the bone, I ran into my house and up the stairs, to find my wife and child. Horror upon horrors, I found them in the nursery, dead. My child, a girl it seemed, had died from a single gunshot. My wife was against the far wall, arms extended and torso bloody from at least one gunshot. A gunman lay dead on the ground partway in the room, no mark on him. Something told me his life had been taken so that I could live again, but it didn’t matter, not without my wife and child. I took his gun and placed it under my chin. I felt nothing as I pulled the trigger. There was no train station this time, reeking of ocean salt and brine. There was just nothingness.
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