“I wondered when it would ever end. The screaming. The stream of blood through the charred timbers. The pain. In my head they became one. Agony. They screamed for their God to let them die, to end the pain but he was not listening and they suffered. We all suffered that day. Screams tore through the souls of the survivors. The blood mingled with the sweat and tears while the fire raged around us.

I cried out for help as the fire licked my flesh. They screamed, calling for death. I screamed to live. My head pounded and I could smell the burning, smell the pain. I wanted to be far away, my head drifting into the real and the unreal. I could feel them dying. The building collapsed. Crushing them, ending it for them. It missed me. I heard it go, the awful creak then crash as it hurtled to the ground, fire shooting everywhere, flames dancing round everything. I, for the first time prayed, I prayed for a miracle, an end to this misery. I didn’t care how, just for it to be over. The unbearable heat closing in, blistering my already wounded skin made me want to escape it.

But for me someone was listening. A current of deliciously cold water cascaded over me. I screamed again as the water hit my wounds causing me to tense and cry out. I was not alone in that building I heard others calling, shrieking for help. The flames died down and for the first time I opened my eyes. I saw what I had heard and felt. The death, it surrounded me and unable to move I was forced to look at what had happened., the tormented bodies littering the floor at cruel and torturous angles. Their faces held forever in a mask of their pain. The rivers of red water running over our bodies, the blood combined, a statement to what we had suffered. The timbers scorched forever with the slaughter which had happened there.

I waited for them to rescue me, I called out constantly and finally I felt the timbers being lifted from my chest and legs, I could move. I was cold. They, the rescuers carried me out of the skeleton building. I didn’t want to look back but I did, I saw only a few follow, I cried.

From that day on they would refer to that day as the day of suffering. For what two hundred people suffered only seven survived. What happened I don’t know. All I can remember is the death and pain. And although they tried to help me to save me, I knew that it wasn’t meant to be.”

She awoke from the nightmare screaming, clutching her chest with sweat pouring from every pore. She screamed until daybreak, the memory still fresh in her head. She screamed until the dawn of the day of suffering. A nightmare of a woman she had never met, of an event long before her time stayed with her for a long time and with time she learned what had happened.

Learned how the woman had been the sole female survivor. The events leading unto the tragedy would never be known, held only in the timbers where the blood preserved the memory of those who had died there. The woman had been called Celeste and for the few days she had survived she had provided nothing, the doctors said that she was in deep mental shock and the only words she said were; “ More shall suffer’’.

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