SHATTERED
by
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August 21, 1976, obituary reads: Bernard Stynte, age 57, passed last night at Methodist Hospital. He was survived by his loving daughter Diane and infant grandson Brian. True he wasn’t the kindest man, but death kills tremendous bad feelings. Loving daughter just seemed the right thing to have written, and you don’t much think about things like that, at a time like this, having just lost her only remaining parent, and her only ties to a life less stressful. Even if those memories aren’t historically accurate, coming only from her necessity for happy memories.
This man that died, Bernard, his story begins where he seemingly ends, on a hospital gurney in room 813, cancer ward. His nurse Angela, a heavyset women with a slight Jamaican accent, somewhere between half his age and his age, it was hard for him to tell, who grimaced at the thought of having to answer to this curmudgeons rants and raves, was the last person he saw, having just left after her routine midnight walkthrough. He simply laid down his head, lost consciousness and passed from that tired withered body, slowly being eaten away from the inside, to a sea of black. It seemed very cold where he was, wherever he was, without the protection of his body to shield him. Not the same cold as being unclad in the snow, he had no skin to freeze, no body to shiver. This cold was inescapably part of him now.
Wondering where he was, the fear set in. It carried the intensity that mounts just before a traumatic fright, only he never experienced that traumatic fright to break the mounting. Scared, he willed himself not to think at all. Living alone nearly all his life, with himself as his only companion, he had tremendous powers of control over his mind. This excruciatingly blank existence lasted what could’ve been years, it was impossible to know, until questions just such as that made it impossible to remain this way any longer.
Why? why? A lifetime of silence, a fear of eternal isolated silence, and “why” was all that came out. Even without a voice, his inner voice echoed this word over and over deafeningly loud. Each time, the single syllabled word
carried with it a lifetime of questions. And each time more humble, broken then the last, as if the question itself was an admission of defeat.
Why am I being punished to an afterlife of silent hell, after enduring a life of the same? Why do you hate me? Is there any escape? His questions all seemingly went unanswered, as he’s taken to directing them all towards a god he had little to no use for in life.
His disregard of faith was always more so an avoidance rather then a disbelief. With no model for an afterlife other then the conventional neo-catholic structure, which he not only didn’t, but couldn’t believe in, otherwise condemning himself to an eternity of fire and brimstone, he unadmittedly but secretly desired that life as he knew it was nothing more then a really bad opening act. To which he now found has an even worse main attraction.
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About the Book
Praise the artist for describing the indescribable. Pity him for having to.
Shattered is an existential x-ray to the mechanics of reincarnation & spiritualism. It’s a personal journey through the interactions of the relationships that we each have, with each other; & with ourselves. Through a lifetime, numerous threads, sewn together become the fabric of who we each are; & along the 24 years of this novel, the connections of each of the characters within, build a composite of the patchwork quilt, of the all of creation. Even the most individualized experiences of a person’s life, foreign to those who don’t live them, become universalized in the way that we, as emotional beings, interpret them. Shattered is, that common thread.
About the Author
Born, in Brooklyn, in 1975; Pete grew up in a world where books, literature, and basically the written word in any form, was foreign and unwelcome. It was not until nearly a quarter century later, after the failure of his first marriage, in a pit of isolation, that he took hold of the lines of such literary genius' as William S. Burroughs, Aldious Huxley, and Franz Kafka, and pulled himself back to civilization. In the connections of their thoughts and the power of their words, the course of Pete's life was forever set askew; as the goal of writing, and of reaching and connecting with people lost in their own pits of isolation, became the driving force of his new life, as an author.