002

   The rain slowed to a halt, and Alan was left alone with the sounds of the room. The respirator: whish - click - whoosh. The EKG - beep, beep. The dull hum of the machinery's cooling fans. And the delicate wheezing of his wife's lungs, heard  even through the chest tube and mask. Her hand had not moved in four minutes.
   Inside Alan's chest, a pain not unlike the feeling of being crushed under a stone was building. It was near the point of breaking his sternum in two, he thought. A harsh sting in the back of his throat turned into a tremendous choking pressure, and his vision blurred through swelling tears. In the time it took for the first tear to roll from the corner of his eye to his trembling upper lip, her heart beat for the last time.
   It cannot be known when the last time was that a man cried so. It was like dying himself and being born again instantly, into a world of tortured solitude. Suddenly he was alone, and he no longer knew happiness, hope, or love. He had lost everything that he was, and now was nothing he could identify. Lost to the lucid agony of tears, and without himself, Alan ceased to be.