Familiarity

Chapter One

Death was a cruel, familiar smell. It filled your nose sickeningly and turned your body to lead as you stared down at your little sister. Her eyes were open but blank, lacking the playfulness that normally spun around her magenta irises.

You desperately wished for this to be some sort of sick joke, for the single-toned heart monitor to spur into quick-paced beats, for your sister to blink and smile at you another time. But she never perked up or smiled again, nor did the monitor beside the hospital bed she's resided in for the past week come to life.

For a long moment, you felt nothing. You could only stare at the lifeless body covered from the stomach down in fluffy blankets with uniforms and butterflies depicted on the top. It wasn't until unfamiliar fingers shut her empty eyes that your sister's death felt real. You were so sure it had to be fake, a hallucination—a drawback from the quirk you hadn't used in hours.

The world crashed within you, breaking down buildings and eating the ocean with a single gulp. Your mind was chaos, full of initial grief and anger and sadness. But you couldn't cry. You had seen the scene in front of you too many times to count.

Then, however—all of the times empty, lifeless eyes caught your own—you didn't understand.

You blinked and the world came back to focus, drawing your attention to the people around you. There was a swarm of three nurses immediately pushing through the four-person crowd that was you and your family. They looked as though they had the fire in their bones to revive her. The ocean of time, however, killed the flame upon looking at her and the heart monitor that had been shrilling a single tone for far too long.

The sounds of your mother's sobs grew louder as realization caught in her fragile, aging body. She brought herself to the floor, hiding her face in her trembling hands. Your father followed her movement, tears pooling at the bottom of his clear eyes. Your brother was left alone by the side of the bed, looking at his twin in complete shock. His hands were by his sides, and he stared, unable to comprehend that his best friend was gone and it wasn't temporary.

The tallest nurse sighed solemnly and took the fluffy, unicorn, and butterfly blanket off the bed in a single pull. It fell to the floor, landing into a heap of nothing. The nurse followed by pulling the thin, light blue blanket—the obligatory hospital bed sheets—over your sister's face.

"Don't cover [Sister's Name] face!" your brother yelled suddenly, reaching over the bed and grabbing at the thin sheet that suffocated the one person he'd ever truly known. Tears began to gloss over his desperate eyes. "She doesn't like when her face is covered!"

The nurse closest to your brother, a short woman with sad eyes, grabbed at him from under the armpits and pulled him away from the bed. Your brother yelled and kicked helplessly, eventually throwing himself onto the tile floor in a pile of sobs.

It was too much for you—the sound of the dead heart monitor, your brother's muffled pleas against the cold floor and his arm, your mother's voluminous cries which began to turn into hoarse screaming. You turned around sharply, removing yourself from the room completely.

Compared to the room, the hallway was quiet and barren. It was nice being able to calm yourself, but it felt so lonely. There weren't any nurses walking with their different colored scrubs drawing attention, and the lights were fluorescent and empty of gentleness.

You began to walk down the hall, looking for something familiar.

In terms of what you wanted to find, it lacked your family or those lifeless, magenta eyes. It was missing the room you lived in when you weren't at school and didn't include the bright pattern on the walls in the children's half of the hospital. You wanted to find something you could use to forget about your sister's death and the feelings inside of you that followed her passing.