Eerie Silence

Belvedere Jehosophat - Sunday, 11 June 2006 - 11:28:28 - print it raw

When Lamarckian evolution gave way to Mendelian inheritance and the great houses of science closed their doors on the fine finery of Paris and opened their hearts to the rubble of Stuttgart, a hospital matron with nervous shoulders and disease-flecked lips, in what was eventually determined to be a completely unrelated event, collapsed and died on the third floor of the left wing of the hospital to which she had given the last twenty-three years of her life.
Well, science was young and science was wild and neither it nor its untamed hair cared for nurses dying flimflam deaths in stone buildings that, by necessity alone, were heated by oil lamps and indiscretion. And it was because of this indifference that the grieving family of the deceased nurse was frozen out of the decision-making process as regarding the funeral. Funerary rights, like moonless nights, once brushed aside are lost forever, and no amount of beseeching or completing of forms will see them returned. Time does its thing.

fodder for the workhouse, targets for the gun