Ty Arthur
In 2013, when our first child died in the womb, I wrote a story called “The Trade.” It was my way of telling the world that I would have literally killed everyone I knew, and I would have done it with a smile on my face, if it meant we could have got back what we lost. I would have happily murdered every last goddamn one of you with my bare hands.
Two years later, when our next child died before being born, there wasn't a day that went by for months that I didn't think about the specifics of how I was going to kill myself. Every day I had to listen to our neighbors scream horrible things at their children through our kitchen wall. Why live in a world where people who don't even want kids get to have as many as they want, while people who do want children to love can't have them?
Instead of ending it all, I turned to to the written word again.
The problem was that there were no resurrection fantasies left to be had. I had lost all respect for fiction. There's nothing that can match the horror of hearing a doctor tell you that you've been head over heels in love with someone who had been dead and rotting while you had absolutely no fucking idea. In an instant you go from the top of the world to a living hell that words can't express.
You have to deal with that moment, from when there was a living, breathing thing inside your wife one second to a corpse of everything you held dear the next. From there it was waiting for the morning you have to drive to the hospital to have what was left of the joy in your life surgically removed while you uselessly sit in the waiting room, watching the world go on around you, utterly uncaring of your pain.
There's nothing the useless horror genre can provide that comes close to that sensation, when the bottom falls out – yet again – but even further along than before. There was no more catharsis to be had. This went beyond the realization that the universe is nothing but pointless chaos. I was no longer interested in making myself hurt less.
I didn't write “Light Dawning” to make me feel better. I wrote it to make everyone else feel worse.
Two years later, when our next child died before being born, there wasn't a day that went by for months that I didn't think about the specifics of how I was going to kill myself. Every day I had to listen to our neighbors scream horrible things at their children through our kitchen wall. Why live in a world where people who don't even want kids get to have as many as they want, while people who do want children to love can't have them?
Instead of ending it all, I turned to to the written word again.
The problem was that there were no resurrection fantasies left to be had. I had lost all respect for fiction. There's nothing that can match the horror of hearing a doctor tell you that you've been head over heels in love with someone who had been dead and rotting while you had absolutely no fucking idea. In an instant you go from the top of the world to a living hell that words can't express.
You have to deal with that moment, from when there was a living, breathing thing inside your wife one second to a corpse of everything you held dear the next. From there it was waiting for the morning you have to drive to the hospital to have what was left of the joy in your life surgically removed while you uselessly sit in the waiting room, watching the world go on around you, utterly uncaring of your pain.
There's nothing the useless horror genre can provide that comes close to that sensation, when the bottom falls out – yet again – but even further along than before. There was no more catharsis to be had. This went beyond the realization that the universe is nothing but pointless chaos. I was no longer interested in making myself hurt less.
I didn't write “Light Dawning” to make me feel better. I wrote it to make everyone else feel worse.
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