Caught in the Blaze

Shifting

5

Amber heard voices. The constant, irritating prick of a monitor. The drip of an iv leaking yellowish liquid into her body. Faces blurred together, a smear of color and light, a rainbow of bright shapes that faded slowly, melted slowly, into a black oppressive night once again.

The sound of her own breathing was liberating, like seeing some long lost lover you thought dead. Amber couldn't hold onto a thought for longer than seconds, each one flitted away from her awaiting hands like distracted butterflies she was unable to catch. The sound that startled the steady, consistent pace of her own lungs was a voice she almost remembered. Distant, forgotten, it triggered a strange nostalgic pressure within her body, like the building magma of a volcano.

Treading the water of her conscious thoughts, she tried to stay above the surface long enough to solve the mystery of that voice, of that someone she lost long ago, but the waves turned red with pain, and then black with sleep.

When she woke the third time it was to an unfamiliar face. With no familiarity the face was cold and morbid, none of the warmth that Amber craved. The room surrounding her was sterile and too bright, like looking into the sun in the early hours of the morning with a killer hangover. When she sucked a breath into her lungs she was surprised by the sudden charge of pain that laced itself up her spine like torpedoes sliding through red flesh.

Amber hissed out a breath, a cornered animal, but the woman smiled and said. "Ill get you more morphine." More drugs, Amber thought sleepily, just what I need.

It wasn't until the nurse was injecting the syringe into Amber's tubing that she recalled Ruby, her lifeless flaming body slumped against the dirty couch, surrounded by darkness with her paler than paper skin glowing like pearls. She felt sudden bile rise in her throat, but she forced it down into her churning stomach, acidic and burning like hissing venomous snakes.

"Ruby?" Amber asked, already knowing the answer, but wanting to see the look of sympathy and regret flit across the nurse's face.

"I'm sorry," The woman said, and bowed her head as if that little movement somehow captured the death Ruby endured.

The blow to her chest was more painful than she would ever admit. Amber closed her eyes and focused on the in and out motion of her lungs, the swish of breath instead of the haunting dead image of Ruby and her red hair and her coffee colored eyes.

The next blow came when the doctor told her she had been asleep for over a week. A short coma, he had said cheerfully, flicking the papers on his chart over the clipboard. We thought you'd be unconscious longer, he had continued enthusiastically, but it seems you're tougher than you look. Amber became worried that this doctor was the one caring for her.

He tested her memory, asking ridiculous questions Amber rolled her eyes at until she found the answer was missing from her thoughts. She could remember her home phone number, but not her address, and what her name was, but not the name of her neighbor. Nothing huge was missing, only strange unimportant things that just took a bit of pushing to recall. She definitely remembered the car accident, and Dylan. That memory was a sharp shard of glass compared to the soft edged other events.

The doctor stood, his ruddy, swollen visage pinched into a smile that looked like dough carved into his face. "Fiona just called to inform your brother that you've awoken, he should be here in a couple minutes." Amber's neck snapped towards the man, a tight pain cracking through her spine.

"Fuck," She muttered, wincing. "What did you just say?" The medic wrung his hands nervously, uneasy by her expression.

"You're brother arrived the day after your...accident. He's been staying at a hotel down the road, a hotel I would recommend if you ever needed the opin-"