Cadaver

• Benjamin Mackie, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2011

The weak chain was twirled around her arms, anchored to a nearby tree, the thick clasp bound tightly around her neck; premonitions of her son constantly tormented her. Shuffling limply and barefoot up to the edge of the rocky cliff, she was met by the soft glimmer of light from the water out on the horizon, while a salty aroma drifted almost solemnly around her.
Consumed in thought, she was finally broken out by familiar voices.
A man and a young boy dashed toward her, transferring her gaze from the broken geodes seemingly floating on the ocean surface below, to the child, Tyrixx.
"Please don't..." the eight-year-old begged. Her vision had become reality. "I need you! I love you!" he wept.
Wanting to tear her heart out, she couldn’t take care of anyone anymore. Without so much as a slight smile, a wave, regret, a glance or a word... sacrificing herself, she leaned backwards and fell.
Gnolic had to hold him back from the ledge, his huge forearms bulging and straining to refrain the young boy from leaping over the barrier between safety and the void of gravity.
"Mother!" the boy cried hysterically. His breathing came in short gasps, shuddering through his body with almost destructive force. Lying on the ground, face down, he bawled.
The chain slithered along the ground, the deadliest of all snakes, as she fell. Gnolic heard a fearsome snap reverberate up to his ears as the boys mother hit the end of the chains length. As quickly as the chain became taut, it relaxed.
Reluctantly Tyrixx lifted his face, revealing heartbroken eyes with an endless depth of despair, despite his age. He wiped the grime from his forehead, while uncontrollable streams of tears continued to fall down his cheeks.
Gnolic - not only the boys human bodyguard, but his closest friend – struggled to comprehend what he had just witnessed. She was gone. No goodbye. No... anything. Guilt was something he scarcely felt, but right now... he was devastated. He had let the boy witness his own mother’s suicide.
No words could express his own anguish as he nudged closer to the cliff. Her limp body laid amongst the sharp, jagged stones at the base of the cliff; a twisted, broken cadaver. Deep lacerations and filth cluttered the body, blood oozed into the ocean, bones protruding through the damaged skin.
Tyrixx noticed Gnolic at the shelf, and began to crawl forward like a puppy wanting food. Gnolic, realizing the approach with the shuffling sound on the grass, tore his eyes away from the mangled corpse far below them, faced Tyrixx and roared at him.
"Get back!" and the young boy flew back almost as fast as the spittle jetting from Gnolic's flapping lips.
Even though startled by his own belligerence, he knew he couldn't let Tyrixx see. It wasn't Gnolic's mother, yet the sight still made his gut churn sickly; the memory was so vivid, he had to participate in a battle against the bile rising in his stomach.