I Hope You Get to Meet Your Hero

The Meeting

  Shandi's hazel eyes fluttered open as the strange sound startled her into waking. The darkness of the room was alarming, and she blinked a few times, squinting once or twice to try to speed up her eyes adjusting to it.

The sound had resembled something like air in the room being shuffled about like curtains opening and closing, both clamorous and eerily quiet and gentle. It gave her pause for a moment as she silently wondered what could have made the strange noise. She took a breath, feeling a discomforting, scraping heat in her lungs that reminded her of where she was and why she was there.

She'd visited the Tulane Medical Center when she was a little girl, once or twice for the flu and for a broken arm later; neither visit requiring a long term or even overnight stay.

This was something different.

She looked down at herself in her hospital bed, at the bandages around the whole of her right arm and knew that they covered what the doctors had deemed third degree burns, but the same doctors had also wondered at the strange and incomprehensible pattern to the burns, almost as if the fire that had injured her had branded her, had intended to mark her in this way. The doctors and specialists all agreed that it should have been impossible.

Shandi knew better. She remembered what she had seen that day, remembered the face of the one who caused it. She could feel her young face screw and contort in anger and grief as she felt her heart begin to pound. Her breathing became quick and painful gasps as her emotions got the better of her and the burns that twined about her body thrummed in pain as images flashed across her mind in painful fragments:

Her father, bloodied and motionless on the couch, surrounded by broken glass, eyes staring at nothing.

Her mother's face, pained and fearful. Her eyes suddenly blank as the life was snapped from her.

Flames enveloping the walls around her.

Cold, black, eyes that bore down on her in twisted amusement.

The searing pain laced up her arm again, thrumming in rhythm with her pounding heart. She grasped the sheets of her hospital bed with her unbandaged hand and clenched her teeth against the burning sensation at her arm and the heat that began to ravage at her lungs as tears streamed down her face.

She clenched her eyes tightly against them, trying her best to not allow any more of the hot tears to betray her grief and her fear.

She'd lost her parents. No. They were taken from her - stolen!

They were all the family she had in the world, there was no one else.

Oh God! Where would she go? What would happen to her now?

She was all alone.

The sudden fear that welled up in her at those thoughts brought another wave of pain smashing into her lungs and it wrapped itself tighter around her arm and she sobbed through her clenched teeth, wanting it all to simply just end and take her, so that she didn't have to feel this pain another moment.

She almost didn't hear the faint sound of a whispering of words that seemed to almost slur from nowhere, but now seemed to fill the room. She tried to focus on the words and found that she didn't understand them, and then...almost as suddenly as the pain and the words had come, there was calm; the burning cooled, and her breathing slowed and then deepened. The burning in her lungs remained, but the pain was subsiding so that it was no longer as intense. It was almost soothing, in fact.

She blinked back her remaining tears and reached toward the small table next to her hospital bed for the small glass of water she knew would be there. She turned to her glass and froze.