Page 10 of Pretty Thing

“Please look me in the eye and tell me if they’re alive or dead. That’s all I need to know.”

Felix squeezes my hand once.

“I know it is.” His voice is soft and filled with concern. “I genuinely don’t know, but…this many hours later…I’m sorry, Eden. I don’t think they made it.”

The tears fall harder. The sobs cause a stabbing pain in my ribs. But I would take the ache a million times for them to be alright.

“This can’t be happening.”

I don’t ask more. My body is too tired and my mind too fragile. The weight of everything presses down on me like a massive boulder. My future feels suspended somewhere out of reach. Something I almost touched and then lost. Why did I take a gap year? Why didn’t I just go to university last year? None of this would have happened.

As my eyelids grow heavy again, fear curls tight in my chest.

“Felix?” I murmur.

“I’m here.”

“Please don’t leave.”

“I won’t. Not ever.”

The beeping of the monitor is steady, becoming a strange little lullaby. The pain dulls into something manageable as sleep pulls me under again.

I squeeze his hand, and he squeezes back, and then…nothing.

three

​. . .​

Eden

Someone is saying my name.

Not loud, but constant, like they are calling to me down a long tunnel.

“Eden.”

I surface slowly, dragging myself up from the thick, murky darkness of sleep. My head throbs the second I open my eyes, a dull pressure squeezing behind them like hands pressing in from both sides.

“Hi,” a woman says softly.

The holiday reindeer scrubs and name tag give away her occupation. She has kind eyes and radiates a different energy than the last three nurses who have come in to wake me up.

“Can you tell me your name?”

“Eden Hale,” I croak.

“Good. Do you have any dizziness or nausea?”

“No, not right now.”

I shift slightly, and my body screams at me as if to remind me of the fact.

“Would you like some water?” I nod. “Here you go.”

She holds out the cup with a straw, and I take a couple of sips, but it feels like glass sliding down my throat.

She smiles gently as she sets the cup aside and continues with her questions.