Cambridge
Cambridge opened the package, and it blew up in his face. Pieces of metal and glass shredded the naked flesh of his hands and arms, and sharpened steel fragments embedded themselves in his chest and neck, stole his vision, flew into his sinuses, and obliterated his senses.
And that was only the beginning.
He did not die, but instead found himself in a place between life and death. It was a grey place, full of shadows and whispers, dread and uncertainty. He floated there for months. In that time, he came to terms with everything he had ever done in his short twenty-two years, all the good and all the bad. Every specter of every deed he had ever performed paid him a visit in those lonely months. As he laid helpless and strapped to machines that kept him alive, mute and blind, the ghosts of his past came to him and explained in simplest terms what their presence meant to the man he had been, and was yet to become, but not one of them could tell him why he had ended up opening that mail bomb on that fateful summer’s day.
First draft: 141223
Published: 230725