4:00 A.M.
Light.
That's the only thing that I see.
Blinding prisms of dazzling white stuff, exploding into hungry shards that impale my eyes.
My eyes. They're like raw eggs. Blind. They stream with wet stickiness and suddenly my heart wrenches as I realize that I'm crying. Sore tears are glittering in the light's neon imprint, the one that's probably been permanently seared into my eyelids, a pink shadow that rears its cruddy head with every blink.
Crikey.
It's like I've never opened my eyes up before. Like my eyelids have been sealed with concrete. But now they're splitting open, stinging in the air, flooding full of bitter florescent light. It's all I can do just to blink.
To breathe.
Even my lungs ache, retching and gasping as if I've just nearly drowned. The air throbs something terrible as I gulp it up. My arms are hanging like stones at my sides—I've only just noticed them. My legs weigh about a zillion cruddy pounds. I might as well go lift up a mountain: I'll never be able to move them. I'm suddenly aware of my forehead, beading with icy sweat, my hair plastered to my skin in dripping hunks. I'm Wallabee the Wispy, Wretched Wretch.
Deader and deader than dead. I've got to be.
But I'm not.
I'm not.
I can see.
The fog is dripping away, the universe crystalizing at my fingertips.
The bed sheets are glaciers, smothering me in ice. There is a beep beep beep singing out from above my head and there is a stupid plastic tube stuck horridly into the crook of my useless arm. I want to seize it and rip it the heck out of my skin, but my lousy arm won't lift.
I blink.
I breathe.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out… (don't forget to breathe!).
My lungs are shuddering. My eyelids are drooping (when the heck did they get so heavy?). There is this square-ish window on the wall across from my bed, shivering with silvery moonlight. That square blasts itself against my brain and suddenly I remember that I've seen it before. I've totally seen it before. Cruddy freaking heck.
Maybe I really am dead. Darkness is spider-webbing across my eyes and seizing my lungs in its frozen fists, dragging me down, weighing me like a billion-ton anchor tugging at my toes. Maybe I'm laying on some stone bed in purgatory, while they try to figure out where to chuck me for eternity. Nobody knows. They've probably forgotten me. And probably nobody cares because everybody knows that nobody cares about me. Or maybe they don't know because they don't care.
Whatever.
I could throw myself shrieking off the Grand Canyon and not even the birds would notice. ("What was that, a stray wind?") Geez.
Why am I alive anyways?
I probably won't live long enough to figure it out.
I'm sinking.
Empty blackness is sinking through my retinas and winding through my intestines and pooling in my stomach. Pouring through my ears and soaking my brain. Filling my lungs with tons and tons and tons of freezing iron. Sparks glint in the back of my eyelids, beckoning me, tugging at the corners of my brain, shoving me back to the rim of the hole of the Wallabee-verse. My toes are trembling at the edge of that ginormous abyss, the black waters of sleep lapping and drooling at my feet. I struggle to breathe and to blink and to focus my eyes and suddenly I wonder why in the heck I'm even bothering to stay awake in the first place.
The KND probably won't even notice that I'm gone. Give or take a few days and they'll be all "Wallabee who?" They'll go find some other kid to induct, some other smiling kid to pin my number on, some other kid to call "Numbuh 4". They'll probably rescue that kid when he gets knocked out, smile when he lands a good punch, and when he's sick, they'll send him gallons and gallons of chicken noodle soup. And then they'll wonder why they didn't try that earlier. The guy doesn't even exist yet and already I'm jealous of him. That scummy little snot.
I blink and suddenly my world is glittering. There are these crazy drops sparkling on my eyelashes, little blurs of slithering light. I suck in a breath and my eyeballs twinkle with the glow of the bare bulbs that are buzzing over my dumb little head. It's not until I feel a sore drip on my cheeks do I realize that I'm exploding with a whole bloody shower of tears. Terrible, terrible, terrible tears. I lay like a rock in a rainstorm, breathing as the downpour thunders over me. Breathing and breathing and breathing and sobbing and sobbing and sobbing.
Sob sob sob.
I probably look a drenched, half-drowned mess.
And that's when I remember my angel.
My angel. In my mind, she suddenly blooms out of thin air, sliding down over me, her tears splashing my cheeks like spring dew from a rose. She's so lovely that even her tears are lovely. So lovely in fact that I would reach out and catch them in my hands, just to look at them for a little longer. But I can't. I struggle and my heart flutters but still my lazy arms won't move. Not even a millimeter. Crud.
Her fingers are the most beautiful things. I notice it as they crawl up my shoulders, as I am wrapped in her arms and drenched in her rivers of shining hair. I've never really thought that fingers could be so beautiful. Or that they could be beautiful at all. They're just fingers. But they're really not.
Not with her.
With her, everything is so beautiful that it releases a fresh tide of tears burbling over my eyelashes and glistening on my cheeks. So beautiful I'm choking on my tears all over again. But I guess that is how it is with angels.
Her eyes are shivering with wetness and bursting with some kind of heavenly glitter, a glitter that I wish I could just drink up and swallow. A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth because it makes me think of the Wallabee-verse and its cotton candy clouds of glittering nebula. Okay, so maybe I won't drink. Instead I close my eyes and feel her flowery breath on me, her tears trickling on my arms and dripping like sugar from my fingers.
I can't die.
I shudder and I breathe real slow, drinking in every oxygen atom and sucking up every drop of airy goodness.
I can't die.
Not while she's still sitting here, drowning me in her tears. In my wonderful mind I sit up and wipe her cheeks with my papery hospital gown sleeves, just so she can see that I'm not dead. That I am alive and am more alive than any other alive thing.
I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive. ALIVE. A-L-I-V-E.
Yes, yes, I am.