Untitled

Part of a story about a leper colony; unfinished.

          As the white medical van carrying a young girl named Caroline pulled onto the edge of the property, a cloud of dust flew up from the seldom traveled road. As she looked out of the back of the vehicle she saw a house immediately to her left, surrounded by nothing but dirt and dying flowers. Where windows should have been, heavy pieces of yellowed fabric were pinned there, ripped and flapping in the wind. A portion of the roof was caving in, undoubtedly because of the numerous splintered wooden support beams in need of much repair. But the sunken hollow spot this roof made in the house was not nearly as deep or as haunting as the pair of eyes that stared out at Caroline from the crack in the front door. She shuddered and turned to check her own face in the rear-view mirror of the van.

            Her normally bright and glittering blue-gray eyes stared dully back at her. She glanced down at her arms, which had been the source of all her trouble in the last year. The spots were still there. Raised, redden trespassers on the delicate skin of her youth. At first she had thought they were burns, bug bites, or maybe even an allergic reaction to the organic health-nut food her aunt had been encouraging them to eat recently.  She gently ran her fingers over the spots. Nothing. Not a shooting pain, or a tickle, or even an itch. They were just there, eating away at her silently and without feeling.

She had gone to the doctor when they hadn’t gone away after a few months. She had waited anxiously in a small backroom of the office with her then-pregnant mother. The room was cold, and she shivered as she sat there in a generically thin gown. The air around her smelled like it was bathed in Clorox by the hour, and the chairs, counters, and walls of the room were all painted a sheer white that not even a virgin bride would want on her wedding day. It blinded and overwhelmed her. The only source of rest for her eyes had been a poster on the far wall that contained pictures of a stick figure running on what was assumedly a treadmill that read “Exercise to stay healthy!” in big bright red letters at the top. She was reading about a fool-proof exercise plan that was guaranteed to lose her “ten pounds in ten weeks” as the doctor came into the room.

She could tell immediately that the news wasn’t going to be good by the way he bit his lower lip and looked towards her with the sort of pity you look at a stray puppy with. Pity looks are never good. Her mother was standing in a corner of the room rubbing her stomach tenderly the way all pregnant women do as the doctor headed straight towards her and started talking in hushed tones. Caroline wasn’t sure if the doctor had lowered his voice further or if her ears had suddenly decided to stop working like the rest of her body as she entered a state of shock. Either way, she heard the doctor whisper only one word to her mother, and it was the only word that mattered. “Leprosy.”

Reviews

[Kyle]

This is powerful and intense! I like how you weaved this story. Keep going with it!