Phantom Pain

The car is driven towards the light quite briskly, something its inhabitant fails to fathom.

Or the dark, depending on the trail it was coaxed into. 

The radio playing a disco track sounds scratchy before it translates into a static.

The driver treads ahead, heedless of the pointer lugged towards right, every potency wanting to catapult it back to a riskless numeric. 

Gazing back, the shadows of his misdoings trail him with equal fervour. 

“Do you want to be in the dark?” An unnamed RJ voices robotically, and her eyes enlarge towards the music console then to the road again.

Still dark.

“I think you’ve been in it for way too long. Now it’s time to step into the lig-,” The static sounds before it ceases and the vehicle gets mouthed by a large white void. 

For a few seconds, she is blinded before he discovers himself levitating. 

The car isn’t there. It’s all too bright, too intense.

“Do you hear me?” The voice ricochets the cavernous expanse, the robotic essence gone. 

She nods, looking around to find its source. 

“Good,” The voice makes her want to close her ears.

“You know what you did to your family,” The voice is chiding. “Do you realise that?”

Her husband, their foster child, flashes in front of her. How he took their daughter and left, owing to her unyielding torment inspired by booze and infidelity. 

She smelled of both then, and the pungency of her dirty deeds nearly makes her reel even now.

“They remember it all,” The voice is unkind, hostile. “And you must choose what to make of it.”

As if the stony weight of guilt doesn’t make its way into her throat, her mind and heart, choking her every awake moment. 

“You are presented with two choices,” The voice impartial, “You either make your family find another, as the father of your child desires, while you live to see it, or you choose to live, while their remembrance of your existence is removed forever, a phantom pain in your heart as their afflictions turn into yours.” 

She has no way out. Not from this one. Not when she hurt people she loves. 

Seeing them live with her betrayal while loving someone else. Trusting someone other than her. Someone who is not her.

“I choose the second one,” She replies meekly.

“Say again,” The voice booms, and a fragment from the ceiling dives into the groundless ground.

“I choose to live with the phantom pain!” She says, determined. 

“As you wish,” The voice fades before all she hears is a loud rumble, and a large fragment heading towards her.

She’s back in her car. 

She is breathing fine.

She checks herself for any anomaly but none.

Except a large hole on where her heart should be. 

All they are now is her memories.