When Patricia had left for home, and the house was quiet and sleepy after four hours of terrible chick-flicks, Hailie sat awake and looked out the window opposite her bed.
~*~
She didn't want to die, did she? No. She thought of all the people she would leave behind. Jonathon. Katie. Maria. Oliver.
~*~
Hailie looked at the wall of picture frames. At least forty photos hung on the light-blue wall, and she drank in each image like it was water for a dying man.
In the centre was a goofy picture of Oliver, Maria and Jonathon all crowded around Hailie's bed, all dressed up for Halloween. Her eyes drifted along the rows and she saw Christmas crackers being pulled with her teeth, karaoke night with Katie and the others, Jonathon surfing, Cookie, her deceased grandma, sculpting wet clay... Their graduate degrees were framed on the wall, among the mostly-goofy memories. Hailie was unbelievably proud of her degrees.
Slowly, looking at her memories, she drifted to sleep, pain ebbing at the edge of her mind.
THE END... (of the story I gave my English teacher, that is)...
YOU ARE READING
Nerve
Short StoryA short story about a girl with quadriplegia. EXTRACT: =-=-= She did not look at the waters that she entered. Did not see the swift current that would soon carry her away, towards rocks that lay jagged under the surface.. Was unaware of how the boar...
