There were no stars in the sky on the night that my world ended.
A sunset lovingly illuminated my surroundings as I paused to drink in the silence of the afternoon. Fiery reds, luminous golds, and gentle oranges danced in the sky. Its glorious evanescence was stunning, and I longed to hold it in my grasp. Loitering beside a stop sign, I dug around in my book bag for my sketchbook and colouring pencils.
These were always kept easily accessible– an extra minute wasted dumping out my bag meant a minute less left of the sunlit scenery. I eased the rubber band off of the roll of pencils with my right hand and slung it around my left wrist. Sometimes, I wish I were ambidextrous, I mused in my head, because this would be a lot easier to manage. As I held the pencils in my hand, I swore, realising I had no table to place them on. Ruefully, I slid the rubber band back over them and fished for my sketchpad.
Its wide dimensions were fairly incompatible with my bag, and the worn edges had become slightly curved from its not-so-gentle shoving-in every morning. I flipped through pages of floral designs and Japanese manga characters, feeling nostalgic. So many memories were alive in this book of art. Near the end of the pages, I found my desired blank. Peering up at the horizon, I realised it had already minutely changed. I had to move quickly.
I pulled a lead pencil out of the banded bunch. Armed with this weapon, my hands soared across the page, my eyes darting up occasionally to check the scene. I sketched out the treetops, then the housing development, then the clouds. Next, after debating it for a moment, I erased from the top of one house a tall satellite antenna that was offending the skyline. No one will know. The speed of light wasn't enough, as my competitor was perfection and the quickly ebbing daytime. I hurried as much as nature would allow me to, laying down my colours with a peculiar feel of nervous urgency.
I glanced up to check the scenery after filling in a faded pink, and the sun was threatening to drop below the horizon completely. Curiously, no stars had popped up– perhaps they were lurking behind the numerous clouds. As my eyes returned to my pad of paper, I thought to check the time. It was six forty-six; Arianna wouldn't expect me back until seven thirty. I continued colouring without a second thought. The night slowly melted into the sky as I drew, adjusting my colours minutely against the pristine photograph in my mind.
And then it was night, and I was finished. Almost. It became too dark to see any longer as my legs felt the ache of standing for such a time. I resolved to complete the shading of the trees when I reached home.
...Home! What time is it?! I quickly fumbled to open my cell phone, the dark face of my old-fashioned wristwatch practically useless. In my haste, the drawing pad fell to the ground. No! Fearful it would get dirt or moisture on it, I shoved my phone in my pocket and bent down to grab it. The motion was painful, my heavy bag crushing my back as the pencils stabbed into my chest. I came incredibly close to losing my balance as the sounds of a faraway car rumbled upon the road behind me faintly. However, at the last minute, I managed to stand myself upright, pad and pencils clutched close. I wisely put the pencils in order in my book bag before once more reaching for my cell.
As I flipped it open quickly, I was horrified to see that it was seven thirty-eight. I was still a half hour from home! I am so in for it, I screamed to myself as I turned to sprint across the street.
There was a screech of tires, a flash of light, and a drawing pad smeared with sunset and blood slammed into the paved road.
✎
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
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.
"You're at the Cowensburg Hospital. You had an accident." The strange woman with the piercing azure eyes stared deep into my dazed ones as she spoke the fatal words. I gazed back, drinking them in, filling my brain with their magnitude.
"What kind of accident?" I wondered if she had been the person who found me after said accident. Was that guilt in her pools of blue?
"You... were hit by a car." Her eyes were grim, the colour darkening in sadness. A car... someone hit me while driving... Perhaps this person was the one who hit me, then! Oh, to be her, bearing such a relentless weight upon her shoulders! I shuddered, and the movement granted me a spasm of hurt and confusion. After recovering, I shakily attempted to string enough words together to ask another question.
"When was I hit by a car?"
"Three days ago." It felt wrong. Very wrong. Three days, to me, was eternity– as boundless as space. I didn't feel as though I'd been asleep more than a few hours, perhaps. I didn't even recall going to sleep, but surely...
"So I've been here for three days? Who brought me here?" I asked this further question with some trepidation.
"An ambulance. You were taken here by ambulance as soon as you were hit."
Immediately, I saw lights flashing. I heard muffled intercoms in my memory. People were talking quickly... their words were the garbled nonsense of an alien race. For a moment, I was lost in recollection, but hearing the name brought me back.
"Annette?" Miss blue-eyes was looking worried again. Why did she tremble as if worry were going to consume her? And why was she on the brink of tears?
"Were you... were you perhaps the person that hit me?" I shakily extended this question to the near-broken woman. I wasn't angry. It was an accident. I didn't wish for her to hold this guilt in her heart.
Her lovely eyes went wide with shock. Tears welled up and threatened to pour forth like rain.
"You d-don't..." She stuttered, choking on her constricted words. The other strange woman in the room turned to her and whispered something not meant for me to discern.
"We warned you that she might not remember everything from the start. Give her some time." At this, the blue-eyed stranger stood up through her heartbreak and carefully inched closer to me. The woman in magenta and the man with the clipboard eyed each other, anxiety plain in their featureless faces.
"You don't remember me? At all? Please, Annette, I'm Arianna, remember me, please..." Those tears broke free and slid down her face as she leaned in towards mine. The simple melancholy of her face nearly brought me to weep too, somehow. Pity and sorrow overwhelmed me, and I brought up my right hand to touch her face, if only to wipe the poor stranger's tears.
I should say I meant to lift my right hand.
It didn't move. It lay as motionless as the moon in a dim night sky.
I willed it up, silently yelling at my unresponsive limb, but it remained still. For what seemed a quickly endless period of time, I ordered my hand to move, and nothing showed any sign of motion. Frustrated, I used my other hand to reach. It cried out, weak, and it wobbled as it caressed her cheek, but at least my left obeyed my orders.
"Don't cry, Arianna. I don't remember a lot of things. I think I'll remember you soon. I'm just tired..." I lowered my hand, working to remember how to smile. She simply forced a grin and inclined her head towards me.
"I'm thirsty." The realisation slapped me across the face as I came to know what it felt like to have a throat made of sandpaper. If the abrupt change in conversation startled Arianna, she didn't notice. She nodded towards the strange woman in the magenta... scrubs? Little memory fragments came back constantly, littering my conscious mind like snowflakes. A few shards told me that her clothes were called 'scrubs'; this made her a 'nurse'. The nurse calmly stepped out of the room, but the man with the clipboard remained, an imposing figure of mystery and paper.
He pelted me with a slew of questions, half of which I could not answer in the slightest fashion. I felt like a dartboard with many marks missed amongst one or two bull's-eyes. As the inquisition continued, my brain began to buzz, harmonising horrifically with the ringing bells in my eardrums. When it concluded, I was much too lost in the mad chorus to care.
Shaking his head with a gruff sigh, the man with the papers shuffled his noisy body out of my prison. Arianna, the stranger of sorrow, was permitted to remain as my cellmate. As the scrubs-nurse returned bearing a pitcher of my coveted liquid, she worked some bizarre magic. The bed began to move, much to my fright. It rose up with an animal grunt, and I fearfully tried to grip the bars to halt this ascension.
Once again, my left arm heeded my directions reluctantly, but my stubborn right one was unresponsive. It ignored me, sneering at my inability to coax the appendage to move. At my desperate motion, the magenta nurse spoke soothingly to me. It was the first time I heard a voice emit from her, and the delivery was soft, like a cloud dancing in front of the sun.
"It's all right. Relax, sweetie."
I had sworn my name was 'Annette'. These sounds weren't the same. However, her fluffy words soothed my unknowing fear, and I allowed my left arm to relax.
The bed, I realised, was on a machine. It bent forward to force me kindly upwards. As I climbed higher, the nurse with the gentle tone extended her tanned right arm. She has no trouble with hers... A plastic cup of water was held out to my tired lips, and I drank. The feeling of liquid sliding down my throat was incredibly relaxing– a lifeline in my desert mouth. Then it was gone, and the blazing sun resumed scorching my insides immediately.
"More water?" The words were swiped from my dry voice before I had the chance to express them. I only had to blink, and the wonderful substance was refilled, quenching my need.
Once my thirst had died off, I was overwhelmed with tiredness once more. I lay, dreamlike, gathering memory pieces into my arms, for what seemed an eon. My morose prison mate observed me closely, and her sapphire eyes were my last thought as sleep reached out to carry me away. They're just like mine...
✎