Ch. 2
For Meaghan, the next three days passed in a fitful blur of waking and sleeping, filled only by the monotonous, seemingly endless command to swallow. Swallow what? It wasn't helping any, as far as Meaghan could tell.
Her now empty and meaningless dreams soon began to bleed into reality, and vice versa... she began to imagine the shadowy figure hunched by her bedside every day, conversing with doctors, was her father, and that he, along with her mother, would nurse her back to health... and protect her from her fear.
But her father seemed only to converse with the doctor... he seemed so desperate, so concerned - "Doctor, when will she be ready?" - Meaghan simply wanted him to come and rock her through those painful bouts of consciousness. He's been gone for so long... why doesn't he just stay with me?
Her fever soon broke, hailed by a bout of sweating so intense that constant and competent care was required to keep her brow free of perspiration. To Meaghan's great dismay, that role of caregiver was rapidly overtaken by her mother... why wasn't her father doing this? Maybe he feels awkward... after having been away for so long...
How blissful it was to forget about this reality! How serene it was to be completely ignorant of the life she had abandoned in favour of that dark, empty unconsciousness! How peaceful, to simply melt into my dreams!
As much as Meaghan had now forgotten the Voice, as much as she had forgotten its perfection... that much, and more, had it remembered her.
As I watched Meaghan drift in and out of consciousness, I was acutely aware of how I had compromised our safety. But I could not let her die... and die she would have if I had not allowed things to take their natural course...
As the wolf hunts the deer, so I, the mother must hunt for life... if only for my daughter.
I, myself, found the gap between reality and dreams to be ever-decreasing... with time, I began to lose myself in the constant cycle of bathing and feeding my Meaghan. Sorrow began to etch itself into my features; I was hardly recognizable as the beauty I was once proclaimed to be.
How I yearned for the simplicity of my old life... Only time would tell how Meaghan and I would survive this.