Artistic License

Part I: Concept

An infernal repeating pulse tore away at my nothingness.

"... a severe concussion, a broken right arm, and two broken ribs. They can't be sure how much more damage they will see once she wakes up. She was lucky the car managed to throw its brakes before hitting her, or she might not have made it. Even then, she's been out for three days now." My darkened eyes felt lost, not my own– a stranger's, borrowed, but a poor fit. I cracked one open with effort that seemed to want to drain my entire life. Where am I? Whose voice do I hear?

The sound of a thousand bells ringing coursed through my head in a painful throbbing. My thoughts were shattered: Where am I? What voice is this? Where did I come from? As I forced my stubborn eyes to open, I became aware that I was in a dreamlike distortion of horrific pain. More words floated in the stagnant air, and I listened carefully for any strand of meaning.

"...struck by a car walking home from tutoring. The driver phoned it in. I didn't even get notified until three hours later, when I was called by a secretary." Who was struck by a car? Where is the car? What is a car, again? These words filled me with an ominous dread. The very foremost of my questions was, who is talking? I thought to turn my agonised head to face the faceless female voice.

I failed to turn my head completely, foiled by something strange wrapped around it, but my piteous gasp of agony did get the stranger's attention. She turned and goggled at me, letting out a startled cry.

"She's awake!" The stranger reflexively toggled a red button on a strange contraption sitting atop her thigh.

"Oh, you're awake. You're awake! Dad, she's awake! Yes. I see her. She's looking right at me!", the stranger was repeating over and over. Another unknown person hurried into the room, a whirlwind of cloth and hand sanitizer. I could see out of the corner of my stranger's eyes that she was clad in soft magenta. Then another person worked its way in. The person clutched to its chest a clipboard full of papers. Papers... a vestige of a memory tore at my heart. As I kept watching, those eyes began to ache from the effort of processing this information. They wished to close again. I let them.

However, they were rudely shocked into opening once more by a slightly different voice. It was deeper. A man?

"Are you awake?"

"Do you know where you are?"

"Do you know your name?"

My mind reacted fearfully to this attack of words, unable to decipher them all at once. It was a stream of odd sounds that were painful, horrible. I shook my head violently... or intended to, but the strange device was still keeping my neck immobilised. I think I'm awake, I intended to say, but I couldn't catch hold of the dangling words. After a long stretch of my intense concentration, a hush fell over the room. One of the interlopers looked at me pleadingly.

"I'm... I'm... really fucking confused!", I spat, flouting what was expected of me. The sounds were distorted, as if my mouth did not remember how to speak. Anger twisted me inside and made my mysterious words seem filled with poison. The voice that was thrust out was lower pitched than my mind's bells, and it felt as though it were echoing from outside.

The strangers seemed disheartened by my reply, their heads slowly shaking with resigned sadness. For their sake, I struggled to recall my name. My last name... I remembered it after some searching. It was Genovese. What was the rest? I fished into to sea of mixed words and pulled out another familiar chain of sounds.

"I'm... Annette... Geno... Genovese." The words fluttered out again, and the voice became calmer; more like my voice. I forced my gaze to settle upon the unknown in front of me. Chocolate brown hair, worried blue eyes. As my mind began to clear up marginally, something inside me brought me to emotionless tears. My voice broke with a soft pain as I asked the blue-eyed stranger where I was.