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Chapter Eight

When Alyss finally returned to consciousness she was staring straight up at the bright overhead light of an operating table. She looked over to see the doctor sewing stitches into her arm where she had cut too deeply. Right away, she noticed something was off. She couldn't feel a thing even though the doctor was piercing her skin and pulling it taught with wire. More than that, her whole body felt as if she was vibrating and kept crescendoing into a full fortissimo symphony of jolting vibration that made her fear that she would go deaf.

Then, silence and an impending sense of fate. Floating. She was floating toward the overhead light. She looked down at her body and she could hear what her blood pumping through her veins, her heart thumping desperately to give the rest of her body the oxygen she needed. Luckily, they had her on a ventilator. She could see every detail of the room in one glance: the way the doctor's glasses reflected from the lights to the microscopic specks of dirt on the so-called "pristine" floor. She could see beyond the room. She saw the wires that ran out from this room straight to a breaker. She followed another wire from the breaker box to the break room. She smelled the coffee in the coffee maker and people in white coats wearing badges, sitting around, and watching some show on a lager television hung on the wall.

She saw in the next operating room over a young girl, maybe the age of ten, who had obviously had some horrible accident. She saw the family on the level below her who had just received news that their ten-year-old daughter had a very small chance of survival. She saw, two floors up, a man who obviously had been there for a long time. The wilted, cracked, and dried flowers on the window sill proved that he once had loved ones that came to visit. The obituary opened on his bedside table ensured that the loving woman would be bringing no more flowers to his room. Not that he would remember for long. His laboured, gurgled breathing seemed to be enough to hold him, sure, but for how long? She saw into the man's eyes. They cried out for someone to end his suffering. The hospital refused to do that. It is an institution based off of keeping miserable people alive and miserable. "Kind of like myself," Alyss thought.

All of this she saw from the space in the room looming right above her body. Then something popped between her and her body and she was standing behind the doctor who was still steadily working to stitch her up like some sort of patchwork monstrosity that fell apart if you even touched its skin.

She didn't know what drove her to leave the room, but she decided to go check on the girl's family. Before she could even take a step, she was sitting next to the man and woman who had their arms around each other, looking distraught. The woman was sobbing silently.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Alyss said clearly but gained no response. "Ma'am?" she grasped for her hand to let her know that it would be okay, but her fingers slipped straight through her. "What the...?" she thought as she tried again and again to no avail to grasp the woman's hand.

"She can't see you or hear you, ya know?" said a sweet, young voice from behind her. "You're not actually here. Well -- I mean -- you are here, but you're not here. Their world is different from ours. You can see them but they can't even tell you're there."

Alyss turned around slowly to see the little ten-year-old girl.