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The worst part probably wasn’t bones splintering to make way for nails, or the constant tugging from his own body weight, or the hunger or thirst or hot sun over Palestine. It was probably having all his pain forced to the outside, the clean cage of his skin torn open and agony bleeding out, so many eyes and no way to hide from them. Cora cannot imagine how terrible it would feel if the typhoons in her mind were visible on the outside.
The living think they know hunger when their stomachs spasm, when their mouths go dry, when they grow weak. But they do not even begin to understand it until they cross over into the land of death. Food will not sate the dead, but they don’t realize it at first. They fill their mouths with rice, yet the hunger grows deeper, opens wider within them. Then they fill their mouths with bread, and the ache grows sharp, as if everything they eat is glass. Finally, they fill their mouths with blood, and at last the pain in their stomachs grows quiet.
No hands can pry the gate open. If you knock, no one will answer.
Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.
