Immortal Tales #Wattys2020

Chapter Twenty Four

...

The girl was floating in the darkness.

It had been almost fifty years since the last time, but she knew without doubts that she was back in the magic limbo.

The little fire in her heart was burning steadily, not in a wild rage like it had the previous time. Somehow, she got closer.

Little threads of yellow light where moving outwards, pulsing with life like veins into a beating heart.

That was it, her Fate. All of the possible paths she could take in her future life, right in front of her.

She looked around, wishing for an indication of what they could mean. Some of the threads at the back of the fire were deadly white, still as corpses. She figured those must have been the decisions already made, her unchangeable past.

Despite lacking hands, she willed herself to grab one of the threads. Her vision tilted upside down and dissolved in a whisper of mist.

She was dreaming, she must have been.

The house she was in was none of the ones she had lived in. It looked more like a hospital room than an actual bedroom, monitors attached to an old woman beeping slowly with the beats of her heart. The woman's face must have been beatiful once, but was now wrinkled and unrecognisable with the tubing attached to her mouth and nose. Her dark skin was yellow and bruised underneath her closed eyes.

Her face looked vaguely familiar, but the girl couldn't quite place her.

A small child, maybe five or six years old was looking at the woman with empty green eyes. His black curly hair was falling on his shoulders, as if it hadn't been cut in a while. Everything about his loosened T-shirt and short trousers screamed that the child had been neglected.

-Abuela? - he asked. The girl could feel hope sparking in his little heart.

-She is not going to wake up this time, son - a young voice said from behind him.

The girl turned with the child and saw a man standing at the entrance. He was tall, scrawny and uncomfortable, like a cartoon character who did not know what to do with his own long limbs. His skin was light brown, just like his hair. His brown eyes kept twitching from left to right, as if trying to take in as much as the room as possible.

Apart from his weird attitude, it didn't sit right with the girl that the young man had called the child his "son". The guy must have been just about a teenager.

-Papa? - asked the child naively. -Can you stay? -

The man stepped ahead and then back again three or four times.

-I wish I could, but they must not know, they must not know, they must not know - he repeated, his eyes twitching wildly. - They do not like what they cannot control son, recuerda -

-Yo recuerdo! - he said clapping his puffy hands, clearly unaware of his father's mental instability. - 15th of August 1940, 24th July 1992, see? I remember. -

The men's smile was the last thing she saw before he dissolved into a white mist, and with him, her vision.