Live and Learn (Short Stories)

Little Girl

Once upon a time there was a little girl. She was tall and beautiful and proud. No one could ever say no to her and no one could ever deny her beauty. She worked very hard and everyone envied her strength. She wanted to become a runner when she grew up, so she tried and trained for all hours of the day. But, no matter how hard she trained, everyone could only see her beauty and they never actually excepted her desires and her dreams. She felt invisible in the middle of this sea of people who all desired her looks and her body.

She couldn't do anything to prove to them that looks weren't everything. She couldn't pull their attention away from her stretched limbs or her long legs, not enough time did she have to show them the power she possessed in her heart and in her feet. Eventually, with the lack of support she was getting, she began to lose hope. She began to depend on her looks to get her what she needed and she couldn't help but enjoy every second of it. Slowly, she lost the only thing she held precious to her. Slowly, she began to lose the strength in her legs and she soon found out that she could no longer run. Quickly now, her legs grew weaker and weaker and they turned to mush. Now, she could no longer walk, having to wheel herself around in a wheelchair. No one wanted to look at her anymore because of how crippled and hopeless she looked. She no longer had her gorgeously long legs and, with the lack of attention and appreciation, her looks faded away too.

She became an ugly old hag by the age of 18. She looked like a wrinkled old witch; even her eyes had aged, and she knew that her life was over before it even started. She was only 18 but she looked 102 and she was afraid that she was going to die, here and now, looking like this. What had she accomplished in this life? Nothing, she had accomplished nothing at all. And she was going to probably die with nothing at all to her name, not a car or a license or a job or even a high school degree; she was going to perish and no one was going to remember her.

And that was the life of Ol' Fanny Mic Fee; Sandrea Potter.

Mother closed the book with a swift movement of her hands, a smile placed on her gentle lips. I knew that she felt she had accomplished something, but it was all just in her head. She thought that she was doing good but... she wasn't. My eyelids opened wide, like they had been for three years, I stared at the popcorn ceiling that I had grown to hate. It was all I ever looked at, was all I was allowed to look at. They never moved me from my spot, never changed my position, not even an inch. I was in the same spot as I have been in since I came here that first day, never moving and never closing my eyes.

My mother had been heartbroken for three months. She never came to visit me and she never went anywhere close to the hospital. She didn't want to believe that her precious little girl was stuck here with no hope of ever waking up again. I must have been a rare case though, not that anyone knew but me, because they say that when you go into a coma, it's like going to sleep for a very long time. It's like, when you wake up, that it feels like you've missed a whole lot of stuff and your bones feel weak and your body feels heavy.

Which makes me an unusual case because I'm still completely aware of everything that is going on around me. No one knows other than me because I'm still in a coma and cannot move or talk or anything at all, but I am still completely conscious of the decisions made around me and everything that goes on within my line of sight, which isn't too wide to be honest with the placement of my empty shell of a body. I could hear my mother when she finally visited me, gasping out a sob as she spotted my lifeless body just lying there. I remember how much she screamed and cried and how she cursed at me and begged me and pleaded for me to wake up. The anger that passed through her, the sorrow that made itself home on her heart, the depressive state, the cheerful, in denial state, and then this state, the state that she is currently in; bliss. She has come to believe that I have no hope left and it doesn't matter whether I live or die anymore; to her, I am already a lost cause. I can't blame her; it's been three years. I wouldn't want her to go back into the cycle of moping because I don't think that I could take any more of it.