The doctors and nurses finally descended, not as healers, but as a clean-up crew for the inconvenient fact of death. One nurse carried a tray of syringes, gleaming like surgical steel promises. Another, snapping on gloves with the finality of a judge, moved to bag the body. The head doctor, his stethoscope draped around his neck like a ceremonial sash of authority, didn't even glance at Sophia. "Take it straight to the mortuary," he declared, reducing a soul to an "it."
The ultimate irony, the punchline to a cosmic joke, came next. They turned to me. They saw my still form, my eyes wide with the horror of what I’d witnessed, and mistook my petrified grief for rigor mortis. I, Nicholas, the man who couldn't properly die, was being pronounced dead by a man who used his stethoscope as a fashion accessory. My heart was hammering a protest against my ribs, a pure, furious drumbeat in a world that had gone deaf. They were carrying me away. The profession was not just a mockery; it was a satirical play, and I was the unwilling lead, trapped in a farce.
The mortuary was the basement of this grand tragedy, the kingdom of the Keeper of the Chapel of Rest. He was a man whose soul had been pickled in formaldehyde long before his body would be. He stared at my open eyes, his own gaze as cold and flat as a slab.
"You, corpse," he grunted. "Why are you looking at me? Close those big eyes before I smash them. You got money?" He leaned in, his breath a ghost of cheap liquor. "In here, only the dead rich get the VIP treatment. The rest of you… you're just practice."
The doors swung open again. They brought in Sophia. My Sophia. The Keeper’s demeanour shifted from bored bureaucrat to keen opportunist. "What felled this angel?" he asked the departing nurse. "Internal bleeding," she said, and was gone.
Now it was just the three of us: the living ghost, the dead love, and the ghoul in charge. What happened next was not just a desecration; it was a perfect, hideous allegory for the state of the nation. The Keeper, with the bureaucratic efficiency of a man stamping a form, shed his trousers. His manhood, a grotesque parody of life, was revealed—a thing of gnarled, lungfish-black flesh. It was power, raw and unaccountable, towering over its helpless subject.
He mounted her. And as he did, the most horrifying thing happened. Sophia’s body, in some final, reflexive spasm, or perhaps in a last-ditch effort of her spirit to reject this ultimate violation, twisted. A sound, faint and foul, escaped her. It was the state ravishing its people, and the people, even in death, forced to give a semblance of participation.
The Keeper, this petty tyrant of the dead, pumped away, a mad bull servicing a broken system. But the system was fighting back. As he finished, he tried to withdraw, only to discover a Kafkaesque nightmare made flesh. His member had… elongated. It stretched, impossibly, a half-kilometre of bureaucratic red tape made incarnate, pulling him out of the mortuary, across the hospital grounds, a monstrous, shameful tether to his crime.
A "team of professional surgeons" from the Ministry of Health had to be called. Not to save him, but to manage the scandal. In a public square, before a horrified and titillated crowd, his manhood—the symbol of his brutal, fleeting power—was surgically severed. He bled out forty minutes later. It was the lesson of the year: the system consumes its own petty functionaries with the same indifference it shows to the people. Even Beelzebub, the original contractor for such horrors, was reportedly impressed by the efficiency.
Somehow, in the chaos, I escaped the mortuary. The memory is a blur, but the violation was a brand on my soul. To understand how we got there, you have to rewind two days before Sophia’s death.
It was a Sunday. The wind carried the dust of a decaying city. I was in my lonely house, a citizen of a country where the national pastime was looking the other way. A neighbour, a prophet of the new morality, shouted across the fence: "Jungle boy! Need a woman? The streets are full of them! Or find a bitch, a duck, a donkey! They're easy, free, and romantic!"
As if summoned by this incantation of depravity, there was a knock. Anita Martin. My past, packaged in a dreadlocked, devastatingly beautiful frame. She was a walking thriller, and I was her willing victim. She pushed me onto the bed, and we performed the old, familiar ritual. She was back from abroad, a successful export, and I was her local flavour, her "bed breakfast."
We were the perfect allegory for a nation seduced by its own returning diaspora—a mix of nostalgia, opportunism, and transactional passion. We decided on a vacation, a "renewal of our love," which was just a fancy term for continuing the party.
And then, on the road out of the city, we met Sophia. The past and the present collided on a dusty road, with Anita’s brand-new Mercedes Benz as the symbol of everything Sophia feared she was losing. The confrontation was inevitable.
"Is this your car?" Sophia asked, her voice dripping with an acid mix of hurt and fury.
"No," I replied, a coward in my own story. "Don't mind. So, where are you going? To the beach, or to screw the bitch?" Anita erupted from the car, a force of nature. "How can I forget you? The serpent who would wear shoes made from her own skin to look tall!"
I became a spectator at my own execution, coaching them silently: Mongrel on Mongrel, till Charon arrives. They were perfect, these two women. Convex hips, concave waists—the entire glorious, terrible geometry of desire. For a moment, I saw them as two paths, two futures, weighing equally in my broken heart.
But good things, true things, don't last in a world built on bad faith. With a motion as smooth and final as a boardroom decision, Anita drew a small, elegant revolver. Seven bullets, like a hostile takeover, found their home in Sophia’s breast. It was the ultimate deregulation of the heart.
She was so beautiful that even Death, a seasoned corporate raider, hesitated before signing the acquisition papers. She lingered for twelve agonizing hours, a testament to the resilience of love in a world that specializes in its destruction. My frozen audience of children slumbered on, their dreams a sanctuary from my waking nightmare.
"Children, are you there?"
A sleepy murmur: "No, we are not."
"Where are you?"
"We are sleeping."
I smiled. The dreamer answering. "I see. Now wake up. Brush your teeth. It's dawn. Find something to break your fast before you give yourselves gastric ulcers. You don't want to die in two minutes from gastric flu." They scurried off, a brief respite from the darkness. And in that quiet, I knew he was still there. The King. Listening.
In the pavilion, King Rhombus finally heard it—a hiss, soft and insistent, like corruption spreading through the foundations of a state. He turned. A woman stood there, naked and unashamed. She had been there for three days and two nights, a permanent, unacknowledged fixture. By day, she was the house next door; by night, a hiss that terrified the neighbourhood. She was the system itself, shape-shifting and pervasive.
"What do you really want from that old man's stories?" she whispered, her voice the sound of rustling state secrets. "Why don't you stay in your palace and enjoy the… loyalty… of your subordinates?"
"Subordinates?" the King sputtered, his royal facade cracking.
"Come to plain words. Give me your meaning."
"Do I need to remind you, Mr. David Coin?"
The name, his real name, hung in the air like a verdict. The King—David Coin—recoiled. "Who are you? Reveal yourself!"
"Relax, sweetheart. Enjoy the show," she purred. "The old man knows exactly who you are. That's why he keeps you at bay. If you want your life back, he must die. But he is… tricky. He doesn't die like a sheep. I am the only one who can help you. This time, he will die for sure. Just wait. Time will tell."
The King, the politician, agreed to wait for the "fullness of time." But I, the old man, telling my story to the children, felt the shift in the air. I knew the hissing woman was there. I knew the King was listening. And I knew the story I was telling was no longer just a tale of my broken heart. It was the blueprint. And the house of broken hearts was no longer just a metaphor for love lost. It was the nation. It was the system. And they were coming for the last man who remembered how it was all built.