Tis Vanishing

She didn’t know where she was going. Her steps faded slowly into the unknown void behind her, among the leaves rustling from the swift winds taunting her every thought. The wind circled her, bringing her hair around her, wrapping itself around her neck as a noose would. She walked on. One steady footfall at a time, soundless, weightless, towards a destination still mysterious even to her. Her arms swung not beside her, motionless as if the Devil had twenty pound weights strapped to her fingertips. Her eyes focused on the leaves in front of her, dead, clumped around desolate trees.
The dark air started to suffocate her if it wasn’t her hair itself. Fear struck her as she moved on gracefully, her neck paralyzed, unable to look behind her to confront the presence lurking behind her. But she kept on in her predetermined course set by her conscience. A ghostly hand urged her to move faster, but something held her back to a steady pace.
She came to a stop where the blanket of leaves thinned and tufts of green poked through. The green stared at her menacingly. Her eyes widened. So alive. So vividly alive as she once was.  The sheer skirt whipped around her feet, stinging her ankles, brushing against her bare feet roughly. The leaves started to shift around her feet as the wind’s velocity increased, revealing more green waiting underneath. She took one hesitant step back.
“What am I waiting for?” she thought, “Could I possibly die any more than I already have? What harm does life have on the dead?” She vanished with the wind.


Who would know what pain anyone else has gone through? Do you think it’s normal to hack your way into someone else’s mind and rummage through their thoughts as if they were just papers with foreign characters scribbled on them, throwing them carelessly aside as you stuff the truly interesting ones in your pocket? Someone drilled a hole in her mind. Someone took the most important information with them, scattering bread crumbs along the way. That someone did a very good job of shrouding the damage left behind with pacifying dreams.
This nettlesome affair affected the events thereafter. One would call this a result of trauma, of physical abuse. One would call this amnesia, the loss of everything dear within one’s mind without the holder of the late thoughts ever missing them. Half of her mind was missing, taken by the lissom intruder.
She woke from a prolonged trance staring into the bare ceiling with wide brown eyes. Her black hair poked annoyingly into the back of her neck as it was folded underneath her back to avoid further tangling. A needle pumped cold fluids into her bloodstream. She winced. A bracelet hung lifeless from her fragile wrist. Saya Mori. The ink bled a little at the bottom of the i. Age: 17. Last she remembered, she was only sixteen.
Her hands shook as they felt blindly around for a call button. This was another hospital. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be a mere sixteen-year-old getting ready for the history test tomorrow. There was a history test. It was so important. She couldn’t miss that test; her eligibility to compete on the math team depended on it. She needed to pass that class. She needed to get that credit out of the way before college.
Saya finally found the call button after frantically searching for it. She breathed a steady sigh of relief as her thumb depressed the button. She thought that if this really wasn’t a dream that ennui would quickly envelope her. The needle was so cold against her skin.
Saya didn’t realize that her thoughts weren’t what they call perdurable. She became distracted by the sullen pattern printed on her gown and was already lost in her own world when a flustered nurse scurried into the room, ecstatic that the call button had been activated after the patient had been lying paralyzed in the hospital bed for three long weeks.
Two fingers pressed into Saya’s wrist.
“Just as the machine says,” the nurse murmured under her breath. “No pulse, yet breath escapes her lips the same as mine. A ghost.”

 

Saya drew in sharp breaths, each one as raspy as the last. Her fingers struggled to close into a fist. The veins in her wrist grew more defined, startling the nurse. She drew back her hand quickly.
“Where’s the…” her words trailed off.
Saya, again distracted, glanced at her hand, focusing on her index finger. A box. A little plastic box. With a red light flashing inside, bathing her fingertips in red. She strained to look above her to her left. Another box. This one larger, metal, with a number. 0%. A line ran straight below it. No oxygen in her blood. No pulse. No life. She looked to her left. A smiling face. Too much mascara.
“Don’t be alarmed. You’ve finally woken up,” the nurse set a cold hand lightly on Saya’s forehead. Saya relished the drop in temperature. “Only three weeks. Could’ve been worse.”
The nurse shuffled out to the other side of the bed and hastily pulled the plastic box off of her finger. Pain. Saya winced. The nurse apologized as she fumbled for a switch  on the metal box with the zero and the line. The machine’s whir died, leaving the nurse standing helplessly at the side of the bed. “I’ll be back.”
She hustled out of the room with quick steps pattering on the linoleum floor. Saya rolled over on her side and closed her eyes. “Please, this is just a nightmare.” A dark world surrounded her again.
Just a nightmare. Just a nightmare.

The lights were long gone, the crowd once enjoying itself sleeping, the gates padlocked. Only one soul, if you want to call it that, remained, perched delicately on top of the Ferris wheel. Dark eyes narrowed themselves on a passing girl, her black hair swirling around her, her long skirt billowing around her bare feet. She was moving at a slow pace, as if she was contemplating something in deep thought.
The figure shifted ever so slightly from atop the Ferris wheel, but the girl twitched at the sound of creaking metal. Short, jet black hair was silhouetted against the waning gibbous moon. The boy crouched farther down. No point in wasting time.
He leapt from the Ferris wheel to the top of a vendor’s tent, not even leaving a marking on the canvas. He shimmied down the pole and touched ground with nimble feet. He took off sprinting through the gate. Through the locked gate. He sped past the girl. Her eyes never met his. He doubled back, and as he passed her the second time, he whispered, “Kai.” But he was afraid that his name would just fade into the wind, just like everything else. He kept running. Kept running free. His name had been heard.

The nurse was pulling a tall man behind her with such force that his eyes started to tear up. “She’s awake! I swear!” Her grey eyes were alive, open, soaking up every detail of the hall in which they were hurrying.
Room 428. Rotate the doorknob. Push the door open.
“She’s awake alright,” the man remarked. The hospital bed lay empty, pristine as it was before Saya was ever admitted to the hospital. “She’s definitely awake.”

Reviews

[justjenn_2u]

A dark and fear filled beginning. Feeling as if she is being followed, gives a feeling of urgency while reading. A journey into the mind of a person who has been traumatized is very intriguing. When I got to the point of the story, where she was 16 but is now 17, this captivated my attention immediately. Seems like this may be a journey into the mind of someone whom has gone brain dead, although probably not. Perhaps souls that have passed to the other side see each other.

[Andromeda]

intriguing