Sin & Savior

CHAPTER 9, PART 5

Seraphina was awash in a swath of emotions she couldn't fully express or describe as she wrapped the nearby kitchen towel into two folds and utilized it to compress her mother's wound as she awaited emergency services or the doctor's arrival. The tension in the air and in her veins were palpable and thick. She knew she didn't want her mother to die, but she couldn't help but feel as if she was doing all of it so her mother could be resuscitated only in order to dig into her once more about how natural and thoroughly she'd loathed her...how she'd hated her guts. To Seraphina: her mother and Alexander were the only people she wouldn't watch bleed out on the floor in front of her happily after having said the kind of things she'd heard in that living room. Yet, and still....this is the woman who kissed her wounds. Who showed up, to every ballet recital, every basketball game, every instance where she needed physical or emotional support: her mother was never once not there for her as quickly as she could arrive. Now, in her hour of need, no matter how she'd felt: Seraphina would do all that she can to keep her mother on this side of life and death, no matter her mortal coil hemorrhaging itself within her hands.

Both the doctor and ambulance of EMT's arrived within 10 minutes, but the pool of platelets and precious life beneath Seraphina's legs only grew as she'd waited on their arrival. They asked her how long her mother had been mortally wounded and unconscious and she'd had to inform them that between sending the doctor an S.O.S., calling 9-1-1, and her awakening from having fainted herself: she'd had no clear picture of exactly how much time had elapsed since her mother became instantiated to her own mortality. The EMT's informed her that, if not for her quick thinking: her mother would never have had a chance, so she did her part, and that they would handle it from here.

They checked her pulse as they'd performed a tracheotomy to allow for her breathing if she were, in fact, still alive as the doctor coldly and in no uncertain terms informed Seraphina that without her haste to compress the wound her mother would have already wholly succumb to exsanguination — the loss of such a large volume of blood from the body it could no longer sustain itself, resulting in certain death — and that she should be proud of herself. Still: Seraphina couldn't help but feel guilt in every bone of her body in spite of his soft words. She'd killed her mother, she'd sentenced Alexander to life in prison, and the rationality required to consider that either of those outcomes wouldn't necessarily be the case was entirely lost on her. She would become the nexus and home of all the emotion and blame she'd hefted upon herself for having allowed her greatest fear in life to come true: to bring harm to her home or her family.

"Seraphina....listen...." The doctor parsed in, between the still, silent air around them and Seraphina's own thoughts.

"Wait...first...listen to me. Thank you for getting here so quickly." She said "And I need to apologize for contacting you out of nowhere at this hour of the night. I'm only a stranger to you at the end of the day." She labored, the words spilling from her lips in heaving, desperate intervals.

"There's no need, Seraphina. Dinner plans aren't nearly so important as the responsibility of saving lives, and that is my first, and foremost, responsibility. Thank you, if anything, for reaching out. I would have been beside myself with guilt if I'd found out I could have helped, and didn't know or did not show." He said, grasping her hand, clamping it despite her palms being covered in blood, and giving her a tender, calming squeeze.

"There....there is something you should know, though..." he sighed as the two of them watched Seraphina's mother be wheeled by gurney off and up the ramp onto the ambulance's innards. "Considering how long your mother has been bleeding out in total...there are only two likely variable scenarios from here: she either experiences a volume of blood loss too vast to be survivable, and her life expires, or...she survives, but her hemodynamic position and neurological sequalae..." he said, before getting cut off by Seraphina

"Speak English, please" she pleaded.

"Your mother, if she survives, has probably suffered hypoxia due to a prolonged lack of oxygen to her brain, and — even with the immediate administration of compression — a wound like that, especially one so close to her carotid artery, barely grazing it, would likely lead to her being neurologically effected for the rest of her life. She'll no longer be the woman you once knew. And...as her oldest child, and closest surviving relative: the responsibilities of next of kin would be assigned to you, directly. As in...it will be on you to make the determination to keep your mother alive on life support, or...to..." he said, trailing off without finishing.

"No way.... No way..... No no no no no no NO NO NO..." she said, falling into a full-blown panic, clutching at her ribs and smearing fresh blood all over her ruffled white blouse. To contemplate whether or not she'd be able or willing to make that decision if, and when, the time came was a literal impossibility for Seraphina to rationalize. Even being forced into an impossible situation - her emotional fragility was too ragged and frayed to meander aimlessly about things like medical insurance or whether or not they'd had enough money to cover keeping her mom alive on life support. Her utter and entire being was to become a swirling microcosm of guilt and worthlessness: she was a daughter of no one's desire, and hadn't cared to pay enough attention to her mother's grief to spot the signs of these lingering demons living inside her soul until it was already too late. She wasn't enough of a sister to keep her dear brother from bearing the kind of burden men thrice his age could not fathom, let alone shoulder. Not only that: she'd left him alone, facing a fate that should have been hers....

She unleashed her overwhelm in a cavalcade of tears, and just as quickly as she'd began: she lowered her head into an unexpected hand that lifted it upright with an effortless flourish of fingertips.

"Don't worry, Seraphina....You're EXACTLY where you're meant to be." Said Dr. James, sweeping her hair away from her face with a bloodied palm before drawing a pentagram onto her forehead and taking her face in his hands. They glowed eerily in a bluish-green hue as he cast her a sickly sweet, almost sinister smile. "It's time to fulfill your purpose." He said, a sociopathic slant fervently stretching itself interestedly across his face.