Invidious

Wait a minute... Who are you? I woke up to the sound of something beeping. Not the slow, steady kind you hear in movies, but fast and frantic, like it was trying to keep me from slipping away again. My eyelids felt like sandbags, but I pried them open. The room was white. Not the warm white of sunlight, but the sterile, humming kind that feels like it’s bleaching your thoughts clean. There was a man in a coat standing over me, his eyes widening like he’d just seen a ghost. “You’re… conscious,” he whispered. It took me a second to find my voice. “Where… where’s my mom?” He froze. “Who?” “My mom. My dad. My sister Emily. They were here… they were here before.” The man’s lips pressed into a thin line. “There’s no record of any family.” That didn’t make sense. I remembered them. I felt them. I remembered Emily’s laugh, the way she’d tug my sleeve when she wanted me to follow her. I remembered my mother’s perfume, the one she wore even when she stayed home. I remembered my father’s rough hands lifting me out of bed when I was too tired to walk. I tried to sit up, but the wires pulled at me. My chest hurt like someone had scooped it out and left an echo. The doctor or whatever he was stepped closer. “You’ve been in a coma for… a long time. When you arrived here, you had no identification. No visitors. No one has ever come for you.” I laughed, a choked, ugly sound. “That’s not true. You’re wrong. I was just with them” But the more I spoke, the further away the memories felt. The details blurred, like they’d been drawn in chalk and someone had poured water over them. Emily’s face dissolved first. Then my parents’ voices. The more I tried to cling to them, the less there was to hold. A cold realization crawled up my spine. “What year is it?” I asked. He told me. It was twenty-four years later than it should have been. I wanted to scream, but all I could do was lie there, staring at the ceiling, feeling the hollow space where my entire life used to be. And in the back of my mind, I wondered Had I dreamed them? Or had I woken up into someone else’s nightmare?

2 months ago | 46

View 13 replies