The D i r e c t i o n e r s Initiative [Ziall Horlik]

Chapter 3 - Slowly, I'm Getting Up; My Hands and Feet are Weaker than Before

“Can’t sleep?”

The words are soft and whispering, even through the speaker that boom from somewhere I can’t place inside my new room. After the incident with that Dr. Reyes, I was transferred to this dome-like place, having smooth glass walls and a single, circular bed in the middle. Sometimes the wall brightens up, usually at day, it almost becomes real. But right now, its pitch black with tiny blinking lights above.

I look up to them, not bothering to respond to the obvious. It’s because every time I sleep or at least try to, the dream, the incident and some more gruesome images flash before my eyes, jolting me awake – and most definitely scared. And during the morning, where I do nothing but lay around, this feeling of anxiety wells in me, like I should be somewhere – with someone.

An electric whizzing occurs, and the room is filled with light from the human-sized opening from one of the dome’s side. A girl, much younger than I am, carrying a tray with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk enters and lays the tray to the unoccupied side of the bed. I don’t move much, just observing her from the corners of my vision. She wears a significant smile and a familiarity where she almost looks like –

“Reyes. Rina Reyes, not yet a doctor, so yeah”

I feel my eyebrows perk at her, showing my obvious surprise. No one has dared talk to me after what just happened, not to mention how she absentmindedly entered my space – alone.

I slowly push myself up with my elbows pressed against the soft mattress, until I’m in a sitting position in the opposite edge of the circular bed, with my back facing her. I was happy that someone was still trying to reach out to me, but that made me equally scared, knowing well how I might harm her the way I harmed the first one who tried.

I hear a soft sigh behind me and then soft tapping of heels hitting carpet,

“They say you’re something special. And I wasn’t that convinced until I saw mom, red in anger with smoke fuming from ears and nose and my dear sister on induced coma for almost a week.”

I hear the soft tapping stop thinking that she left, no sooner was I proven wrong when she spoke for the last time.

“You’re my sister’s work this past 2 years. Keeping you alive was a priority much higher than keeping her self healthy. I just- I just wished you would prove your worth, that-that you’ll be what they say you are – special”

I hear the click of her heels against the marble and the electric whizzing, signaling the end of whatever humane contact I recently had for a week, and probably the worst one I might say. Her words leave me under a spell of awful distraught and confusion as I hunch over, my palms cupping my own wet face. The headache comes in but it’s easily ignored, like there are matters much pressing than an imaginary sledgehammer hitting my head with such force and with such realistic pain.

“How?” the word escape my lips, in a state I too, find myself in – frail and very broken.

So I move over to tray with the plate of cookies and a glass of warm milk. I bite into the hard pastry, tasting the milk chocolate filling and jugging the warm milk after, preparing myself for the days ahead, should I stay here forever, I might as well get used to it.

As I sit there, eating in the darkness, with tiny blinking lights above my pained head and the soft carpet underneath my cold feet; clueless of how this is my last night here in this room and oblivious to the frantic pace of people and words outside the safety of this dome, I close my eyes and search for the thing my body needed most at the moment. Carefully laying the tray unto the floor, with its contents fully consumed, I lay my head and for the first time after waking up, I drift back to sleep.