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Karma
Karina Neves

           They told me he’d never make it through the night. If he did, he would live the remainder of his life as a vegetable. Replaying the past few hours in my head – the urgent call I received just past midnight, the sleek convertible, no more than a crumpled mass of metal littering the side of the highway, flashing lights of emergency vehicles, my husband on a stretcher, blood caked to what remained of his face when they finally pulled him out of the flames – I felt nothing. And I don’t mean “nothing” in the way of the numbness that overtakes the body as a means of self-preservation after a traumatic event. I know the feelings I should have felt, as I watched my spouse laying on the hospital bed, cut, burned, bruised, and mutilated, possibly dying right before my eyes. Shock, horror, agony, despair – any one of those would have been appropriate for a scenario such as this one. Yet I could not muster a single emotion.
           The passenger was killed on impact, or so I was told by the authorities. I did not know who she was, not what she looked like. I saw her for the first time when they asked me to identify her after she was pulled out of the wreckage and, by then, her face no longer held any characteristic features.
           I imagined she must have been beautiful. Young and carefree, with no regard for morality, favoring her own pleasure over ethics or propriety. Perhaps she was simply naïve, believing as I once did that she had found her soul mate in this man. Perhaps she was not young at all, but another woman like me, also unhappy in her marriage. Perhaps she, too, married too young, settled down, had children. And after some years, her marriage grew stale, as marriages often do. Her husband began neglecting her, working late nights, taking a few too many business trips.  She decided she wanted more, needed more. And just then, she found this man. He shot her that dazzling smile, bought her a drink. He came into her life and made her feel like a woman again. Did she know that, somewhere, there was a woman, much like her, who stayed up those nights, waiting for that man to come home from late nights at the office?
           Whoever she was, it somehow seemed easier to pity her than the man, who now lay before me. I turned my attention to the impressive display of machines, humming and beeping robotically, each one with its specific purpose to keep him alive – one delivered oxygen to his lungs, another replaced the blood he had lost, another nourished him. How ironic, I thought, that he should be the one with such an extensive array of equipments to keep his heart beating, when it was mine that had been shattered.
           I imagined him lying there for years to come, his mind trapped in a body that would never function again. Would he live in agony, tormented by his betrayal? Or would he relive his last moments with her, replaying them over and over – their first date, first kiss, their first… Would he ever once think of the woman who waited at home on those late nights, or the children she tucked in by herself, the children she would now have to raise on her own?
           My thoughts were interrupted by the long monotonous drone of the heart monitor, as the line went flat. As I loosened my grip on the cord in my hand, it fell to the floor, slipping past my sweaty fingertips. They told me he’d never make it through the night. Sometimes fate just needs a helping hand.