The Widows of Wichita County by Jodi Thomas

know you hurt, but hang on, darling. Hang on.”
    He tried to open his mouth to tell her she was wrong. Somehow there had been a mistake. He didn’t want to hear, or think, or feel. A dark void finally lulled him into numbness. Her words pulled him back to the surface where the horror stayed vivid. He wanted his suffering to end.
    Let me die! he tried to beg. But he could not make words form. Let me die! Please, God, let me die!
    Pulling at his bindings, he fought to take flight. If he could run fast enough and hard enough, he could outdistance the pain. He was surrounded once more by shouting and movement and machines. As he fought, he realized he couldn’t feel his legs.
    Let me die! his mind screamed. What did it matter? He was already in hell.
    The woman was there in the chaos, begging him to live. She didn’t understand. If she knew his torment she would not keep asking.
    The sound of her crying finally eased him back into the blackness where his mind could rest even if his body still throbbed.
    When he awoke the third time, the pain was too familiar to be shocking. Drugs had taken the edge off of hell, nothing more. This time he heard the drone of machines forcing him to breathe. He cursed the technology that kept him alive.
    He drifted, trying to make his lungs reject each breath. Trying to force his heart to stop pounding. People moved around him, whispering like gnats in the night air. Nobody heard him beg for death.
    Someone must have understood a fraction of his suffering. He heard her near, crying once more. He no longer resided alone in fiery hell. She stayed at his side. Unwanted. Unbeckoned. Unneeded.
    Time lost all meaning. He would wake and force himself to take the blast of agony before his captured screams drove him mad. Then he’d hear the voices, and the woman sobbing softly at his side.
    Sometimes, she would talk to him, low and Southern. For a second, he’d remember life before the pain. Moments, frozen like photographs, but real with smells and sounds. A ball game played on fresh-mowed grass. Drinking cold beer on a hot day. He felt the chill slide all the way to his gut. Sleeping on the porch in summer, with music from the house competing with crickets outside.
    He forgot about his pain and tried to move. Volts of fire sliced through him. All thoughts vanished when the drugs dulled his mind once more.
    Time passed, others came and went. The light grew softer, then brighter with an electric glare. Once, in the moment between blackness and agony he was aware. He made no effort to open his eyes, but listened to thesound of rain on the windows and a conversation hovering near.
    â€œLook at the bastard,” a man mumbled. “He can’t live much longer. That special nurse said it was a miracle he’s hung on this long. She said there’s a rule, age plus percentage burned equals chance of death. The old man’s fifty-eight with a sixty percent burn. That equals no chance in my book.”
    The male voice laughed. “The staff wants to move him to a burn unit in Dallas, but Crystal’s following Daddy’s orders and keeping him here. He’d already be there if they could have gotten the helicopter from Parkland Hospital through the storm the first few hours after the explosion, before they knew who he was.”
    The man’s low voice grew closer. “Now he has next of kin. It’s Crystal’s choice, and she’s not likely to forget his ravings every time he got drunk and talked about never being taken out of the county to die. He used to swear the big city hospital killed Mom. Too bad they couldn’t do the same for him.”
    â€œStop talking about him, Trent. He might hear you,” a woman’s sharp tones answered. “The hospital is doing what they can. They’ve turned this room into an ICU, and equipment from the city is coming in by the hour. He’s got as much chance here as anywhere. Stop talking about Daddy as