Three

I still watch over my sisters, except only one thing is different: I'm dead. Melissa continues to guard her sisters, but is her presence keeping them from moving on? Is she right or just crazy?

I could see her eyes shut tightly and her chest raise and lower as she breathed. Her face was cloaked in scars and dry blood. Her hair was the same color as mine, even if she looked bruised up her hair remained the beautiful color of a crisp brown. As I looked at her lying in the hospital bed I could only think of the pleasant memories we shared growing up; after all she was my sister. When we were little girls around the age of five or six, I remember Maddie, Marina and I would always run out in the darkness of the night and hide in the high cornfield located in our backyard. I always hated it when dad would come home drunk; it not only scared me but my sister’s as well. I couldn’t stand for it; I couldn’t tolerate the pain, so I would sing. Singing seemed like the only thing that was comforting at the time. So I would sing to them slowly and softly; “Ring around the rosy a pocket full of poesy, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” It was a happy song, I loved to think about the ashes falling, my father’s ashes.

The hospital room was quiet, other than the silent thump of machines resting near Maddie’s bed. A doctor entered the room; his long white coat dragged across the floor like the train of a wedding dress. He proceeded slowly to the foot of her bed where a brown clip board with papers attached waited for him. He picked up the board, holding it firmly in his left hand while gently flipping the pages with his right. With every turn of the page he let out a disappointed grunt followed by the shrug of his shoulders. His face remained unchanged but you could tell something was bothering him. He quickly exited the room with me following closely behind. I knew he could sense my presence, but he just ignored me. This was no ordinary doctor; he was the only one who could actually see me. He told me to call him Dr. Drew sometimes we would talk about stuff, mostly about me; he would ask me how my day was or if I felt sick. There was one time he asked me how Maddie was doing , which was strange he is the doctor so he should know. For a hospital it was like a ghost town, not that many people were present but the doctors and nurses. We walked down the hall and past each solid steel shut bolted door of other hospital rooms. The doors were bolted tightly so it was sound proof, it would be hard to breathe but there was a tiny opening, so you could see inside the room but the window was bared, like they didn’t want the patient to be able to ‘escape’.

We entered room 407 where I watched Marina sleeping in her bed. She did not look as bruised up as Maddie. The doctor walked over to her clipboard, seemed content with the information written on it and left the room with me still hot on his trail. The explosion really got them bruised up. The memory was still fresh in my mind as were the memories of our childhood. It all happened so fast. Dad came home drunk as usual and Maddie had enough. She could be quite persuasive when she wants to be. Loving her so much,  and wanting the best for Marina, I did what she told me to do, which was stab dad then burn the house down, simple right? I did it, and when it was over I felt so proud.  I saw a strange luminescent light and ended up here in the hospital staring down at my own body. Three days have passed since then and ever since then I have been wondering the hospital watching my sisters, reading to them, singing to them and talking to them although I knew they can’t hear me because, well I’m dead. Eventually Maddie and Marina were released, but after their release I couldn’t leave the hospital, something was keeping me here, so I stayed. I looked back at the hospital records and what was strange was there was no record of a Maddie or Marina Hampton. So I asked Dr. Drew about it and he said if I drank this really cool medication I would feel better, and I did! I felt great!

Now that I think about it I didn’t know that a hospital could also be called an asylum; I noticed the sign outside the hospital read “Hanes Asylum for the mentally ill”. Isn’t that funny?