𝐙𝐄𝐑𝐎 - 𝟎𝟎𝟏 𝐅𝐀𝐍𝐅𝐈𝐂 ✔️

000

They were poking you again. Shining directly into your eyes was a bright light. A light so bright, you could still see it in the back of your mind, even when you looked away.

Your arm was sore. The skin had been pricked countless times. Who knows what they were injecting you with now?

"Where's papa?" you asked, trying to keep from trembling.

The room was cold, as was the bed. And after a while, the smell of antiseptics grew unpleasant. The dull hum of fluorescents drowned out your racing heartbeat.

The nurses above you smiled, at least that's what you thought. The crinkling of their eyes told you so. The rest of their faces were hidden by surgical masks. Their fingers by gloves. Their bodies by special scrubs.

It was as if they were afraid to touch you. But why would they be? There was nothing wrong with you. You were as normal as any other eleven year old.

Except you weren't—and the nurses knew that—so did papa.

The nurses were extra rushed this afternoon. The sight of their stress only caused your own, so instead of studying their frantic movements and worried faces, you admire the shades of their eyes, the inflections in their skin, the color of their brows. You imagine what the hair on their head looks like. If only it weren't covered by a net.

"Her body's not big enough to handle all of this," a nurse says.

"We have to stop now!" another one adds.

"We can't!" You hear papa's voice now, but it's too far away.

Even as one of the nurses injects another chemical into your body, you focus on her eyes. They were brown. They were soft. They were big. They were tired.

This game of distraction comforts you. You admire a freckle here, and there a falling eyelash, a fading scar. Soon, you've tuned out the world before you. Now, they can't hurt you because you're in one of your own.

The edges of it begin to fade away. Little by little, they erase completely, until you're in a void of emptiness. Everything and nothing all at once.