Unsuspecting Blessing.

iv

     iv

Julia laid in the hospital bed, numbed, comatose. Her nose battled with her, having an unbearable stuffy quality to it, and the nostril her body attempted to breathe from was clogged with a wall of a mucus. Her body, though she was completely asleep, still had awareness, and her consciousness told her organs that there was an abhorrent pulsing pain that originated from her leg that felt like a mixture of soreness and wooden stakes being stabbed through her skin. Her breathing switched to her mouth, she could feel the release of pressure and force that it took to draw in oxygen and push out carbon dioxide.

Eventually, light poked through her eyelids and bounced off of her retinas. The ceaseless pain in her leg started to fade, like fire burning itself out into a pile of embers and ashes. The soreness rose again as the wind took hold of the fire and would grow the flames to a roaring inferno, but as soon as the wind would abate, the fire would go down again and the pulsing soreness felt like one singular welt of pain in her leg—instead of spreading throughout her entire body. Julia pressured herself to be in control of her awareness and force her eyes open, but her eyelids only complied to about thirty degrees.

When her eyes opened a smidge more, she could see the world around her. Well, barely. The world around her looked blue and gray, so she assumed she must have still been outside, but the colors blurred and swirled like she was on a merry-go-round with cataracts. Julia had only a shot in the dark of a clue as to where she could be, but the wind started to stoke the fire, and the soreness came back with too-soon familiarity. She felt herself losing the consciousness her mind efforted to grasp, but her body simply had not enough energy to comply with the demands of her mind. The spinning world returned to the light darkness as her eyelids closed, and Julia returned to her stupor...

Time had passed, she could tell, but she could not tell how much. Her intuition with how bright the lights were that penetrated her eyelids, was that the time ranged around the late evening now. But there was a certain light that had not stopped since she first awoke, an unnatural light that was brighter than the one from outside. She knew now that there must have been a window to the right side of her, because her right arm felt hot and unusual compared to the rest of her body—though the feeling faded shortly after her second time waking. Julia began to worry that she had lost feeling in her right arm, and she worried because she started to remember; she remembered a few things: She had been hit by a car, someone she knew helped her. Other than those two concrete facts, her mind drew blanks as to every other question she had. Though, she did put two and two together that she must be laying in a hospital bed, and that her arm did not lose feeling or happen to be detached from her body—instead, she knew the sun was setting.

Julia felt a burning sensation in her stomach, but it did not feel painful, it only made her abdomen contract and constrict like she was being forced to throw up. The feeling in her that felt like a rat eating away at her stomach lining, she knew, was guilt. Hatred swarmed in Julia's mind, for the driver, and for herself, and for some reason the boy that came to her while she laid on the asphalt. Oh how her head ached from the impact of her skull on the road. But the pain was only a quarter as much as the one deep in her stomach that manifested itself into a scolding rage like she drank a piping hot bowl of chicken noodle soup without letting it cool; like a ball of molten iron sat in the bottom of her stomach. She felt herself reach for her stomach to clench it and hopefully give relief to the pain, but no hands came to the rescue; instead they stopped at about an inch off the hospital bed.

For a while, Julia sat in quietude and a darkening lightness that had sat at a cool gray for the past half an hour. No sensation around her that she could perceive with her eyes closed, except for a few sounds of footsteps outside where she was, and queerly a throat being cleared. Julia sighed, but not physically. Her mind sighed in boredom. Not even the presence of pain felt near. Footsteps approached, and she felt a concoction of excitement and anxiety that made for a terrible taste in her mouth.

Someone got up from sitting down, she heard the aching and popping of an old uncomfortable chair and the paired hapless soul that had to sit in the chair. But who would be near her? Especially someone who stayed silent for minutes upon minutes and most likely hours upon hours. Julia hated being in the dark on information, and the feeling frustrated her to no end.

"Anything?" A voice said, one that sounded young and male coming from the right side of the room. It sounded just as anxious as Julia felt.

The second voice came from the left side of the room and was female, also sounding young, but more mature than the male voice. "We haven't any records of relatives—"

"Not parents?" The first voice split the sentence of the second.

"Not parents, not aunts, not uncles, not cousins, not siblings, not even a grandparent that we know of."

A sigh came from the first voice, and then a pause in the conversation.

Julia knew they must have been talking about her, such things were obvious in a close vicinity, no other patient would be as familially isolated as she.

The first voice spoke: "I already told my Mom I would be staying here for—"

Staying here? Julia did not even know who this voice was, she didn't even know what the body that the voice came from looked like. Staying here? In her room? Julia felt panicked and her eyelids shed a crack of sight with her pupils. The crack got bigger until she could fully see the ceiling above her—though blurred—completely. Julia felt her heart rate go up, she did not want some stranger staying the night in her presumed hospital room. She needed to object! She needed to make him go away! She needed to— She needed to sit up. The wind did not stoke the fire of her pain at that time, but it surely did stoke her motivation to remove this person from her room. Julia, with all of her power, which felt like zilch, forced her torso upright and a cry came out of her so ferocious that it sounded distorted like the croaking of a frog. She got a glimpse of the male voice at the apotheosis of her rising, but the crescendo immediately dropped as her entire body flopped backwards.

"Woah woah woah!" the male voice shouted, and footsteps followed as his face approached hers. "You have to be careful you've been in an accident!" The face above Julia looked hazy to her, but as her eyes came into focus she could make out the features plainly.

The wind picked up, and the fire stoked smoothly as the pain rode in on her leg like a morning tide and pulsed through the rest of her body.

She thought, Neurons, huh? Who needs em? The pain in her leg grew from manageable to excruciating very shortly. She started to groan and grab for her leg, but her hands would not come.

"Hold still," a female doctor said, making direct eye contact with Julia.

A prick, Julia felt, on her leg inches away from where the pain originated. Presently, the pain eased and then subsided.

"Now I can't be giving you doses like that constantly, Ms. Greenwood, so you are going to have to get used to the pain as it comes."

The face of a boy still hovered above her eyes, watching her. His features came in clearly once the pain in her legs faded, and she could see brown eyes and black hair on a darker than pale complexion. Julia remembered, she knew this boy, and she knew he was at the accident. Brian Peterson, she recalled.

He walked away and talked with the doctor more, but Julia did not listen. Could not listen. The pain in her stomach returned, and it stung more than ever.