Iridian

05. IMPETUS

.memory (fragment #4)

I looked at myself in the large, wide mirror occupying the space above the bathroom counter. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. My skin was flawless, crystal clear for the first time in years. Gone were the sunspots, the random acne scars from breakouts. My dark hair had lost the dank limpness it had deteriorated to when I was ill, appearing far more lustrous that it had ever been. I'd always looked a little younger than my real age but the face reflected in the mirror seemed to have had perhaps ten years stripped off—it was so incredible to be almost frightening.

But the greatest and most unsettling transformation was the eyes.

I had dark brown eyes. Common. Unremarkable. The eyes that gazed back at me with a confused expression were nothing of the sort—they were a deep amber, with hints of gold reflected in their depths. They were too beautiful to possibly belong to me, yet—the impossible had happened. I leaned forward to take a closer look, twisting my head this way and that to make sure the colour wasn't a trick of the mind. I imagined I'd have trouble getting through Customs on my current passport—that was how different I appeared. It was like looking at someone who looked like me, but wasn't me.

And then there were the hands. The eyes and the hands are usually good indicators of age. Mine? They were no longer the bony version with pale blue veins showing through. I'd regained most of the weight I'd lost during illness, though I was still a little on the thin side—a side that I'd thought lost forever with age. How that was possible without eating for three days, I didn't know. And with that thought, came the question—how had I managed to stay so fresh for three days, without moving? There was none of the usual staleness of being bedridden clinging to me. The soft cotton t-shirt I was wearing seemed to be just out of the dryer.

Then it occurred to me that the t-shirt wasn't mine, and neither were the shorts, though they both fit me well. Where were my clothes? The hospital had stored my belongings in one of their common bags when I had been labelled a Jane Doe, but there was no sign of such a bag anywhere.

I tottered over to the wardrobe—still feeling a mite unsteady—and opened it to find an array of women's clothing, all to my rather unsophisticated tastes, but none were mine. They were all new and the sizes were correct, down to the undergarments. A disquieting thought tremoured through me, my eyes straying over to the closed door. Had Dante bought all this? Was he the one who changed me out of my hospital gown and kept me clean? I obviously didn't smell like I'd spent three days without a bath. In fact, a sniff of my hair seemed to indicate that I'd just walked out of a shower.

I shivered, hugging myself. The idea of a total stranger manhandling me—despite being stuck in an ICU before this, where unfamiliar nurses did exactly the same thing—put me in an uncomfortable spot. I'd have to ask him about it to be sure because I had a feeling he wouldn't have let anyone else near me in my comatose state.

Quietly, I pushed open the bedroom door to see where Dante was. The door opened up to a small living area that led off to a balcony on one side and a kitchenette on the other. Dante was seated at the counter separating the kitchenette and the living area, concentrating on a slim silver laptop. He didn't seem to notice that I was there, so I padded softly to the open balcony door.

A light rain was falling, in contrast with the late evening sun shining just behind the dark clouds. I could hear the patter of raindrops peppering the building like a soft, but persistent drumming. Such weather was common to this part of the world. My grandmother used to admonish us for playing in the sun-drenched rain, saying that it was a time the spirits walked and we would get sick. Thinking back, it was probably just an old wives' tale to get the kids out of the oddly disparate temperature caused by the rain and sun being out together. People did get sick more often than usual from that sort of rain, so perhaps there was some truth to her scolding.