“He will have to beg for my Forgiveness.”
My hands, strips of bone plastered with skin, manage to carve into the sullen wall.
This isn’t what He promised.
The piece of metal I use is a spring from one of the last beds. Worth a sentence worse than the sweet relief of death. It looks at me in the dimness, lit only by the slant of moonlight that reaches through the gap between rusted metal panels.
Everything is reaching here, reaching but never finding – like falling through thin air and grasping at nothing. Yet the inevitable void of hopelessness is never ending, like the striped fabric on our backs which are printed in thousands, only to be burned weeks later. Even this piece of metal, not as blunt as I first thought, wants to reach through the soulless night and trace lines across my skin, begging to greet the artery of my throat. Will I let it? Will He allow it? The writing on the wall questions it too, wondering if this is the forgiveness I seek. Or are these the thoughts of a coward?
A hunger in my pointed ribs disagrees and my fading body, riddled with disease, cries at the aspect of being destroyed so painlessly. My soul pleads with me to end this suffering, although its voice is quiet, hanging to my being by a thread.
But my mind is one of strength. I cannot give in, not with the agony I have endured. My life has not become a chain of tortured days just to end up as a shell of the person I once was. I’m already on my knees because it hurts to stand. My hands rise, shaking with fatigue. It’s one of the hardest things my consciousness has had to do. The whole universe seems to hold its breath as the makeshift blade slips through my fingers. It disappears, a lost shot of hope running through the cracks in the floor. I watch it go for years and feel an all-consuming regret. Regret, agony, longing. It’s better than this strangling numbness that encapsulates the remnants of the man I used to be. Slowly, I press both my hands to the wall, then to my forehead. I imagine it to be cold, but my mind has blocked out the sensation.
A prayer perhaps.
To what? To whom? It’s almost laughable, the undying pleading for Him to release me, to save me. Am I not worth His mercy? Are we not worth His time? I pray for Him to look up from his careless slumber and watch the parade of children march to his gates. Or at least provide a show of hope that there are moments of peace in this prison of pain. A flicker of kindness behind the uniform, to reveal the human behind the monster.
But the nights are persistent, and this torture is endless. I search for a hint of new life to give me hope in this sunless montage. But everything is dead here, reaching for a heaven I’m undecided exists.
Is He powerless?
After months bleed to years and lives turn to smoke, I decide whatever this is, it is not God’s love. But it is not the devil’s hatred either. This is man’s cruelty, and I feel ashamed to be human. Ashamed in the belief of a saving grace when perhaps the only chance of being saved was lost along with the tarnished spring.
It laughs at me from the unreachable space under the floorboards. It says my faith was wrongly placed. I feel a tear drag its way down my face, feel the salt burning my skin. I savour the pain, as it’s all I have. That and the words I carved:
“If there is a God, he will have to beg for my Forgiveness.”
Aimée Wade
Aimée is a second-year creative writing student studying at York St John. As well as working on her own novels outside of University, she likes to experiment with different forms such as short story and poetry. Throughout all her works there is a strong focus on the human experience and human emotion. She grapples with grief and trauma which is seen in this piece. Aimée’s primary ethos for her writing is to get her reader to feel something and educate others on issues and concerns we as a race try to avoid.
This story is based on a survivor from the Mauthausen concentration camp and the engraved words found in one of the many cells there. The camp was first built to hold political opponents, people labelled as criminal and antisocial. It grew to hold all people who went against the Nazi regime across Europe. Prisoners were forced to work the granite quarries and their daily lives were shaped by hunger, arbitrary treatment and violence. During the second half of the war, Mauthausen itself became a camp where the sick and weak were sent to die. The prose questions the ideas of Heaven and Hell and how both are found intertwined on Earth, leaving death as the only chance of peace for the victims of Mauthausen.