Incandescence

Chapter 8

Alisha

I lay straight on the hospital bed, while the three nurses around me gave me a sponge bath. My legs still hadn't healed therefore, I was unable to walk and bedridden. I was still using the urine bag and the stool bag to pass out the wastes from my body. I so wanted to walk and move now, just for the heck of it. Staying confined to the bed all day long was irritating me as the days passed and I was getting better. I had asked the doctor's permission to use my laptop and work from here, which he had granted. I had started overlooking my official work from my hospital bed, as I was quite bored with nothing to do all day. Shahmir and Sadaf were handling it perfectly while I received daily updates from them. They came to visit me every day and sometimes, Sadaf stayed with me at night while mom and dad went home to sleep. They were helping me out in any way that they can.

 I turned towards the nurse, who was sponging my arms. Their hands moving up and down my arms and legs looked so monotonous. I was being an impatient teenager lately.

How much longer? I thought. I hated sponge baths because they didn't leave me with the satisfaction which I had after taking a shower. After these baths, I still felt dirty. The nurses finished giving me a sponge bath, helped in a new gown and then left the room. I wasn't allowed to see my body as it was covered from neck till toes. The umbrella like protection prevented me from seeing myself. I moved up on the bed in a sitting position, which the doctor had allowed me after a week of lying in bed all day. I picked up my MacBook and flipped it open.

The nurses had tied my hair with a band, leaving my neck cool and my face open. It was such an amazing feeling to feel the cool air on my neck. I thanked them profusely. I was trying to open the Safari browser from the desktop when the icon next to it somehow got clicked and opened. The application read Photo Booth. I minimized it as it was loading so that I'll exit it once the application had initialized. I clicked on the Safari icon and returned to the Photo Booth which had opened on its own.

What happened next was totally unpredictable. One second I was looking at my picture on the desktop, all smiling and beautiful on my graduation day, while the next second, I thought I'd seen a ghost: an ugly ghost who was a distorted version of me. The face that was looking back at me had a rather distorted face with a leathery texture. The right side of the face was covered in something that was a weird color of yellow and white color, it looked like it was made up of play dough while the left side was all clean, normal and soft. The skin had some leathery texture to it, almost making it look gaunt and scary. The skin was charred at some part of my cheeks and followed towards my neck. The eyes that stared back at me were the same colors as mine, chocolate brown and the skin on the normal side of the face looked like my skin as well. It was my face, just a distorted version. I tried to touch the left side of my face but it felt smooth under my skin. My breathing hitched as I realized that it was I, who I was watching in the mirror. The ghostly skin, the gauntness in the eyes, it was all me.

And then I screamed. As loudly as my vocals could scream, I screamed and screamed at the top of my lungs. I saw the ghost in the screen in front open her mouth and scream but the only noise that I heard was of my own screen. This can't be me! This can't be me! I tried to tell myself again and again.

The door flung open and the nurses rushed in, looking around at my source of terror but she found nothing because there was nothing there but me. She came towards me and glanced at the laptop. Seeing the Photo Booth application open, she quickly, picked up the laptop from my knees and shut the flap.

"You're not supposed to use that, Alisha, yet!" she scolded me as she put the laptop back on the side table. I was having difficulty breathing and my heartbeat raised on one of the monitors that was attached to me. The nurse glanced at it worriedly and then came closer to me, giving me some water.