Michael Malone - Weebly

Falls had but one exchange, and the last four numbers
were the year of her birth.
He said that he could sleep now. Judith knew that
she, too, could sleep. She wondered at the strange
peace she felt. It was not that her bruises and
lacerations and her strained heart no longer hurt, but
that she had taken in the pain like cold air into the lungs
so that pain itself was restful. It was not that, but how
oddly untroubled her heart was, how unafraid. There
was the difference. She was no longer afraid. Nor was
this lack of fear simply knowledge that she had now
suffered as much terror, as much loathing and loss, as
bullying life had to threaten. Not simply that, tortured,
she had been willing to leap off the precipice into
madness and had fallen, still unbroken, into the sea,
where she floated sane and whole. Not simply that she
had begged Death to carry her down, drowning
knowledge; or that Death had, for an instant, held her in
the dark water, then pushed her painfully back to air;
though all were undoubtedly true. And doubtless she
would be told that this peacefulness was the anesthesia
of shock; that she was still too stunned for wild grief.