3 weeks earlier
Mum looks worse today. Her skins grey and she can barely stop coughing to breath. I couldn't leave her to go to school today no matter how many times she told me she was fine. I know she isn't. All she does is sit there in our worn, withered arm chair with a glass of water in her shaky hand. I'm watching her from the window ledge where I'm sitting, and it's tearing me up inside. She's so weak but we have no spare money to get a taxi to the hospital and our phone no longer works so we can't phone her doctor. We wouldn't be accepting a lift from anyone around here either. You'd have no idea what they could be carrying on them or in their car.
She's been suffering from lung cancer for about three years now. Her doctor, Dr. Adams, has been trying to help her recover since the beginning but lately she feels like there is nothing else she can do. She says maybe if we had been to the doctors a bit earlier they might have been able to cure her but she still thinks it was unlikely. It hard to watch her suffering and sometimes I wish that she would pass away so that she was no longer in pain, but then I have no idea what I would do without her.
"D-dora?" she asked hoarsely, "H-have w-we got anym-more c-covers?" I nodded quickly and lifted the one I had been sitting on and draped it around her shoulders and her chest. She stopped shaking as much but I could still feel her vibrating as I hugged her. Quietly I started brushing out the little hair she had left. She used to have a huge main of dark curly hair like mine, but due to treatment she had lost huge clumps of it and had only just managed to grow it back to just above her shoulders. I threaded my fingers through it and started to braid tiny sections of it.
"S-sing to m-me" she asked quietly, relaxing as I kept braiding. I started to sing quietly.
Made a wrong turn
Once or twice
Dug my way out
Blood and fire
Bad decisions
That's alright
Welcome to my silly life
Mistreated
Misplaced
Misunderstood
Miss no way it's all good
It didn't slow me down.
Mistaken
Always second guessing
Underestimated
Look I'm still around
Pretty, pretty please
Don't you ever, ever feel
Like you're less than
Less than perfect
Pretty, pretty please
If you ever, ever feel
Like you're nothing
Less than perfect
You're so mean
When you talk
About yourself, you were wrong
Change the voices in your head
YOU ARE READING
Pandora's Box
Teen FictionPandora had been through every pain that is in the world. Disease, her mother had suffered from cancer for a huge part of her life. Poverty, she had lived in the smallest of apartments, a small two-roomed flat, with only a broken mattress that she h...
