Before I Fall

(5)

"I'm sorry mama,

Now I know your boundless kindness mama"

Chapter 5 - Mama

Screens and machines of every kind decorated the room. Each and every one was either showing complicated statistics or rapidly moving graphs.

Though each machine, may it be big or small, had one thing in common: they all presented information about a lone individual.

Despite the humongous amount of machinery and technology present in the room, at the very middle lay a bed with a boy on it.

He lay in bed slipping in and out of consciousness every few hours.

It was an irregular pattern that no matter how much he tried to fight it, at some point it just over takes him completely.

Leaving him in the depths of darkness in himself.

Every inch of his exposed skin seemed to have either a needle or a suction stationed there. Those devices were now wired to the different machines present in the majority of the room.

Even underneath the thin hospital gown,hundreds more decorated his skin like Christmas ornaments of some sort.

Not all the needles monitored his state, those others injected served as a tube for intake for various drugs and substances in his system.

The dosages were changed day by day as if the sickness the boy had was fickle-minded and wouldn't decide how much he wanted to infect the boy or something.

He was like this since he was a child and here he still was, now a man.

What kind of disease could have plagued this long?

But the harsh truth was...

He wasn't sick at all.

He was healthy.

He was perfectly normal.

Days of his childhood run rampant in his semi-conscious state whether he was completely awake or dead to the world.

Those were the only memories he had that weren't consisted of white rooms, machines and syringes.

His family was indebted to a research association that was known to discover remedies to viral diseases and the like.

His father was diagnosed with a tumor at its later stages and they had no money to pay for the fees that the surgery would offer and so they turned to the research association with the promise that they'd repay them somehow.

Paychecks and a surgery later, the family of three celebrated of the surgery's success.

However the happiness was short-lived since the research association had encountered a shortage of funds for their upcoming experiments and pressured the family to repay their debts.

At first, everything was going as planned, making ends meet by the jobs his parents took in the effort to repay the debt as fast as they could.

The association couldn't wait any longer and had turned to violence.

Kidnapping his father and holding him hostage urged his mother to take up jobs even though it meant she wasn't going to have a proper rest after each shift.

He barely saw his mother each day.

He had offered to stop his studies to lessen the financial burden it would cause his family.

His father was reluctant about it at first but then agreed afterwards to his son's offer.

His mother however opposed the idea so firmly that she had called a string of colorful curses one could ever utter.