The Sapphire Express Read Online Free PDF Page B

left? What do I do now that my heart has died, and only a shell of a man is standing alone in the quiet cemetery with his fading bluebonnets? What do I do now that my desperate fists have destroyed all the walls and doors? What do I do now that I am no longer a father? What do I do? Do I die, or do I keep living here with my pain? Oh, what do I do, Annalise?
    Needless to say, we both lost our jobs after our baby was taken from us. Eden didn’t even try to go back to work after the funeral, and I left voluntarily after a series of nasty fights with the principal—consequently saving the school board from the hellishness of firing a unionized teacher who had just lost his only child.
    I hated my job so much after my eyes were forced open by the trauma I had never invited into my life, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the education of the new generation anymore. The school didn’t mean anything to me, and I no longer wanted to replace the horny cow and become the principal. I just despised her and her lustful eyes, and they burned my skin like a torturer’s blowtorch every time they focused on my wretched body and started feasting on me. The fire was scorching my drained intestines so hard that I started to see her as the incarnation of the Angel of Darkness herself, the wicked one. I walked the halls in my tight pants that exposed the shape of my testicles and tried my best to hide the hate and beast’s fury raging inside me. My quietness concealed a horrible, satanic danger that lived inside my tortured body, and the fuse in the invisible bomb of dark thoughts and uncontrollable rage was burning fast. The deadly solar tornado was expanding like a gasoline-fed bonfire, and I knew that it would soon consume everything, everyone. I got so scared of myself that I e-mailed the principal and said that I was not coming back. She said that it would be OK.
    It seemed like Eden and I had truly been cursed and sent to the vestibule of hell. We had lost everything, and even the day care business, Rent a Sister, we had started in our hopelessness and delusion when Eden had stopped going to the library went under after a rowdy kid pushed another kid against a sharp corner. The boy got out of the hospital with a couple of stitches and a blue gorilla sticker, but his parents sued us for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that marked the end of our well-intentioned business venture. We were officially broke.
    Soon after, we couldn’t pay our mortgage, and the bank threatened to take our house. Eden couldn’t bear the thought that someone else would be living in Annalise’s room, and her health started deteriorating fast. Her will to live was gone, and it provided a fertile ground for all kinds of cowardly diseases to thrive inside her. They took full advantage of the huge chink in her armor, and the bastards seemed to follow some wicked orders to finish her off as fast as possible—get rid of the one who no longer contributed, the one who was lost forever. Eden died on December 24, when the first snow started falling on the mossy roof of our dream home.
    After that, I was alone, staring at the table that Eden had set for Christmas with the trembling hands of a dying mother. I had been emotionally alone from the day Annalise had died, but now I was also physically alone. It was an utterly terrifying feeling for a man who had always had someone beside him, someone to share his thoughts with, and someone to rely on when the world kicked him in the ribs with a steel-toe boot. I simply didn’t know how to live my life without Eden, and I was scared of my solitude and how it would affect me. The demons weren’t the companionship I was looking for, and they only strengthened the grip of loneliness. They told me to drink all the beer I wanted to, now that the puritanical eyes were closed forever, but the thought of having a beer in that house made me want to rip my spleen out.
    I soon realized that I had arrived at a place where