Sunny Side Up
For fair weather friends
Life seemed so far away.
A memory lost to a dream, one mislaid in waking, only to find she never had, drowning instead in the tangled throes of a nightmare that had become her {life}. Suppose it never had been, simply was. Out of reach that is. Somewhere, just beyond her grasp, an inkling of a thought once was. Missed even, but unbelievable not that it couldn't have happened – that it did.
She wasn't the only one {un}fortunate.
Odd;
To say the least.
That much was certain. A victim to circumstance veiled in goodwill – he could understand that and she supposed he did. The way his finger hesitated on the trigger of a gun. Both of them wishing someone had pulled the trigger long ago. Too stubborn to admit they already had, suffering its wound every day.
Irony wasn't the word for it.
But it worked just the same.
"They did this to you?" It was a statement of fact, muttered on the guise of question if only to be polite. The answer was before him, strewn out over light cabinets where black film developed intricate works of biological art. By all accounts, the trauma to her body had been so severe that recovery, if even to be confined to a hospital bed, was enormously unlikely, if not a complete miracle. Recognition carried in his posture, stayed an itching trigger finger where penitence forfended gaze- yet his face had remained impassive behind a grim effigy.
For once, Death hesitated.
Sani hadn't the energy to move, let alone fight for her life. And truth be told, her get up had all but gone, buried among the rubble of Calado's enterprise., wrapped in gauze and cut to a hospital no one knew existed. Vishkar's despot concern had filched Rio overnight and reshaped its streets to their whim. Every stretch of road and hearth of home had been rekindled by new light - new "opportunity" they called it. The tragedy had precipitated new ventures where theory breathed life to science; If hard light could build buildings, why not bone? Sani had been the first of fortune's {un}favored few. Crushed beneath the fold of a lost empire, the Window Rock intern all but lost to paralysis.
Brick and stone.
Blood and bone.
She still bore the scars of their work, glowing beneath the soft flesh of skin that healed seemingly overnight. Truthfully, it had been only two weeks - still yet, "only" and her body had restructured every trauma that riddled a broken body. One better left for dead, more so - granted. Though fortune pitied her on clouded remembrance.
Where she simply couldn't, if not fully recall - any of it. Glimpses educed on adrenaline laced heart beats set to the rhythm of "I am going to die" allowed succinct insight to her most recent past. The crushing weight of a collapsing building, the absolute numbness that embraced her (shock, they had called it), the ringing that drowned a world consumed in flames, and the absolute shit-pantsingly horrifying realization that 'this was it' ; Her life was over and it never amounted to anything more than a cabinet full of poorly drafted floor-plans.
"Oh fuck," were the words she spoke, resigned to a succeeding end on dead sarcasm, "You're going to kill me, huh? This sucks."
"No," rasped the dead. Dark tendrils of smoke coiled about his countenance. Wisps of ghostlike serpents, hissing softly as they breathed about the whittling of his shoulders.
He made her uneasy.
Not so similar to the way one might perceive a snake.
Nor such a blacktop in winter.
Much more as a rabbit might pursue a wolf.
A disquiet completely separate her initial and enduring fear. It was a deep seated king of rats that gnawed, chewed and tugged at her insides as a stranger to Life lingered on every note of hers. Scrutinized her terminality, a pornography of bone on black film, illuminated there in the dark of a light night hospital wing.
The hospital bed creaked beneath her as she shifted her weight, stressing newly healed bones as she sat upright. She winced at every motion as pain set between the stiffness of every joint. Nose scrunched to discomfort, she addressed former declaration, "Hard light," she said, "That's why the X-rays look like that. All blurry and shit. Doctors keep calling it something like, F.E.P, not sure what it stands for, something very complicated I bet. They say within a year I won't be able to move at all. Not sure how I feel about it yet. Guess it could be worse," she shrugged, sleek hinged-braces facilitating every rigid move, "So," the syllable danced on her tongue, drawn to the cadence of a curious song, "If you're not here to kill me, then who are you here to kill?"
Sani's unapologetically average life had managed a lottery's draw of happenstance. Calado. Vishkar. And now...this.
Whatever this was.
Though if he was quite determined, she would certainly be quick to implicate Vishkar Corporation. After all, it was their procedures that had stripped her from its grasp. And if her kindle were to be snuffed on their error, then they would undoubtedly follow her to the grave.
But as she turned her eyes up to greet his shadow once more - she found her question answered by an empty room.
She frowned.
Surely he had been there just a moment before, she could swear by his form, recant every feature of his ghost. Unless of course - that's all he had been, a shadow of a thought, a bedridden patient's conjuration of company, terrifying but true, or as true as a mind could manifest. No, that certainly wasn't right.
Was it?
With great effort she swung her feet out of bed. Her legs were weak beneath her, unaccustomed to the literal walk of life despite every therapy provided. She peered about the room, examining every inch of corner, squinting into every pitch of dark as if, by willpower alone, she were to summon her Reaper's countenance to form. Yet he never did - and remained a worrisome question of sanity to the forefront of her mind.
Her gaze drifted to the cabinets of film that had so utterly entranced the dead.
For a long moment she stared into their capture before raising her hand to touch its take. The plastic creaked beneath her press, fingertips illuminating a soft blue as they reacted to the light that coursed through not only the fluorescent board, but the building itself. With a twist of her wrist and a pinch of fingers, she gripped the tendrils of light and manipulated their course. She was no Vishkar architech, her ability to control and direct an unpracticed guesstimation, granted by way of fortuitous consequence. If there were anything to take from Vishkar's fault – she was glad to find it was this. Everything they'd built their empire on - inadvertently transcribed to the genetic code of her being.
The light cabinet went dark.
And so with it – the silver of film.