The Freckle ≠ Soul Algorithm

Chapter One

Picture a nineteen year old girl. Now make her taller. Red hair. Blue eyes. Skin almost percelean, almost. Freckles dotted everywhere. Golden pinpricks across her arms and hands, scattered loosely across her collarbone. As if somebody flicked a paintbrush dipped in liquid gold in this girls direction, splattering her with these golden freckles. Her face was the most adorned with gold, scattered all across the bridge of her nose, her cheeks, even a few on her brow. This girl was me, three years ago.

My mother and I had gotten into a fight. It was so silly, so trivial, that neither of us remember what it was about anymore. Whatever it was, my freshly nineteen year old self left. I slammed the door and never looked back on my mother. I went to live with my sister and ended up couch surfing for a while, i'm not really sure how long. It must not have been as long as I thought though; they still found me.

The phone call came. It rang and rang for days on end until it was unavoidable. I didn't know the voice on the other end, the words brought me to my knees though. Im dying. Please come home. Im sorry. They echoed through my skull for days. I'm sorry. Im dying. Home. Of course I knew who it was. Nobody else would ever apologize to me in a death note. A death phone-call, more aptly put.

Five days after the phone call, I was unsure how to feel when my key, which I'm not even sure why I still had, allowed me entry into my once-home. The house was deserted, although it was very evident that my sister had made her presence as well. The knit scarf she had made me for my birthday some years back was lying across the back of her favorite chair, pulling forward the memory of my throwing it there in refusal of acceptance.

A note left on the coffee table had my name scrawled across the top. I can only imagine writing that note, having it staring back at you for five days, not knowing if it's intended reader would ever actually read it. Short and to the point, it said three things. Cancer. Saint Marys Rm. 304. Come before its too late.

Have you ever smelled a hospital? Really stopped and smelled one? When you walk through the corridors, ride the stiffly silent elevators, or break the busy hum with the clearing of your throat, have you ever smelled one? Don't. It's a haunting smell of clean and chemicals and sick and medicine: The powder inside sterile rubber gloves, the overly clean floors, the dripping hand sanitizer dispensers outside every door.

Room 304 wasn't hard to find. Hard to look at, hard to think about, hard to go anywhere near, but not hard to find. A solid six hours I spent pacing the corridors before I convinced myself to see her. I hadn't come all this way for nothing.

The cafeteria salad Id eaten in efforts of avoidance tried to make one last escape up my esophagus before I swallowed both it and my pride and entered the room.

Barren, deserted, and cold; a sterile wasteland engulfed me only a few steps in. My eyes scanned the room, slowly taking in every detail, looking at everything except the bed.

I saw the rubber grippy bits on the bottom of the hospital socks first, the kind they give you when you can't feel your feet properly. The sheet covering her body looked almost as if there were no body underneath it; she had grown so frail, courtesy of the cancer. She began to cough, waking herself in the process.

I wish I could say the fear left me then and I rushed to my ailing mothers side, but that is not entirely true. Swallowing again, this time my panic, I willed my limbs to carry me to her side. Her coughing was causing more violent tremors throughout her body now and not knowing how to help or comfort her, I laid my hand across her knee.

Slowly her coughing fit stopped and as she greedily inhaled the desperately needed air, she became fully conscious. Her eyes widened with recognition, pity, and love, seemingly all at once. I'm sorry, She stumbled over the words, I didn't think you would actually come home. I had hoped She trailed off as the machine attached to her started beeping. Familiar with the routine, she reached towards it and pressed a button, silencing it.

Her hand rested atop mine then and a tiny, almost imperceptible flash of what felt like strength and weakness combined flowed through me. I probably wouldn't have even noticed it if she hadn't created an expression on her face that somehow managed to look exactly how that flash felt.

Immediately, we both consciously wrote it off as a static shock, fully knowing that's not what it was.

For the next two days my mother felt better than she had in months, leaving the doctors utterly baffled. They couldn't offer a single explanation for the uplifted spirits or lack of machines beeping.

They also couldn't fathom the sudden decline on the third day, when she returned to her then-normal state of general misery. Again, courtesy of the cancer.