Chapter 2: Three Mistakes
Rosalyn Tamlin
The fever washed over the man on the bed in front of her. First the headaches came, then the vomiting. The color of the man's skin had faded from it's usual color. The doctors all said it would pass, and that eventually everyone would get past this, but Rosalyn knew better. As she gazed upon the man's dying face, she knew today was the beginning of the end. She just wished everyone else could see it too.
Rosalyn Tamlin grew up here, in the heart of Savannah. At twenty-two, the girl had never really found a purpose, or something she excelled in. She was always praised by school teachers because she was always good at everything. This was a curse. Rosalyn had waited all her life to be truly great, this day hadn't come...yet. She grew up with tales from her father of courage and valor. She hoped that one day, she'd take her place among them.
Rosalyn opened the door to her apartment with a twist her palm, and entered the room she had grown so accustomed to over the last three years. She was in her senior year of college, and still only had a pile of junk for living space. She turned after locking the door behind her and found her brother, Isaac, sitting atop the couch, staring blankly at the screen of the television as he always did when he was bored. Isaac hadn't had anywhere to go after he was evicted from his own apartment, so Rosalyn offered hers. "Hey bud! Whatcha watchin' today?" She smiled radiantly on his direction.
"Oh...hey!" He said, turning around, surprised to find his sister home so early. "Did...did you get any dinner?"
In her job as a nurse at the hospital in downtown, Rosalyn had been part of a procedure where a man died on the table, and they gave her the rest of the day off for trauma release. He had some sort of infection that no one had ever seen before. "First days of a new disease always call for a few deaths." Her doctor told her after the man fell. "If there aren't, we'd have no way to make a cure. The common cold would have turned into the Black Death." Although she felt the doctor's words were exaggerated, she did feel rather estranged by the whole situation. She knew this one was different than any common flu. This one was dangerous...
"I did!" Rosalyn smiled at her brother, and he returned it in an awkward manner. "And I got your favorite!" She reached into the bag on her arm, excited to see her brother's reaction.
But Isaac was surprised to find that instead of a sub sandwich, or a hot dog, Rosalyn drew a long green glass bottle out of her cloth bag she always took shopping with her. "Rose...that's not dinner..." Isaac stuttered, rather confused. "That's wine."
"Okay, it's not dinner, but it is your favorite!" She laughed, as she set her things down on the island beside her. She set the glass down on the light brown table she just had refinished and rushed to the cabinet to fetch a few glasses.
"You know I don't drink... There's... There's not even an occasion." He spoke, standing up and walking over to the table to sit on the other side of it.
"The occasion is, it's our twenty-second-and/three-quarters birthday, silly!"
"That's not...that's not an occasion."
"It's not?" Rosalyn laughed.
"Nope."
"Oh..." She knocked him on the arm and he didn't really understand why. She then attempted to explain herself as she had to with all her jokes. Isaac didn't quite understand sarcasm. "To be honest, I was just looking for an excuse to get some of this stuff."
She took the corkscrew she had grabbed from her desolate cabinet in the kitchen and began to drive it into the top of the bottle. While she was opening it, the looked back up into her brother's eyes and saw that they were not the ones she left here that afternoon. They were full of sadness.
