Unmoved

He tried to move. But he couldn't.

His hands weren't bound. Neither were his legs. No iron chains or rope binding him to a wall or tying him down in a chair. No visible injuries on him, except for a long-forgotten, but clearly visible scar on his arm from an accident he'd gotten into on his first motorcycle. In all physical senses, he could've just as easily carried his wife and walked out of the room, as he could've batted his eye lids.

But no, this didn't have anything to do with his current physical state. Neither did it have to do with the hospital room he was in. He was not alone (well, technically alone NOW), but the room still felt empty to him. The air around him was ice cold, a tell-tale sign of the proficiency with which the air conditioning repairmen had worked just the previous day. It made him cold, but he didn't care. The cold air wasn't even the last thing on his mind.

He stood, holding in his arms an hour-old baby. His baby. His own child, who he wasn't even looking at let alone bother to notice that it was crying it's eyes out, bawling like, well, a little baby. Only an hour before, it was his wife in his arms, and he was holding her, comforting her, willing her to push, to give birth to that beautiful baby girl that now had taken her place in his arms.

One would say at the time, the girl had no idea what had happened. But the girl knew. Just like her father knew.

He tried to move. But he couldn't...as he stared into his dead wife's empty eyes.