The Fourth Sacrifice

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By now he knows he is going to die. And he feels something like relief. No more long, lonely nights and tortured dreams. He can release all those dark feelings that he has carried through life like some great weight strapped to his back, causing him to stoop and stagger and bend at the knees. But still this knowledge, that death is close enough almost to touch, is not without fear. But the fear has retreated with the effects of the drug, and lurks somewhere just beyond consciousness.

He is only vaguely aware of those things around him that have been so familiar these last months: the scarred and naked walls, the rusted window frames, the washing hanging out to dry in the glassed-in balcony beyond the screen door. There is still a smell of stale cooking in the air, and sometimes the occasional hint of raw sewage that rises from the drains in the street four floors below, especially when it rains, like now. He hears the rain pattering on the windowpanes, blurring the lights of the apartment block opposite, like the tears that he can feel, warm and salty, on his cheeks. Only now does he succumb to an overwhelming sense of sadness. What futility! His life, the lives of his parents, and of their parents before them. What did any of them mean? What point had there been?

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