NANOWRIMO 24 Day 2

Needs some editing, but that's for another day.  

Prompt: The day the mirror shattered

 

 

The sounds: dings, beeps, groans, murmurs.

The locale: Intensive Care Unit

The characters: mom (dying), daughter (crying), assorted disinterested medical workers. 

 

The hand of the younger woman who was mid 50s? early 60s? -- grief, especially sudden grief, ages one quickly --  was soft and freckled,  pulsing with life. It clutched – if one can clutch desperately but gently too, the hand of the other, which was unnaturally white and punctured with needles, bandaged, bruised black and red, cold. Too cold. 

 

They were practically doppelgangers, obviously mother and child, separated by decades but connected in ways that couldn’t be seen, but even objective observers, like disinterested medical workers, could feel. Their hair, both recently shaped, chin-length bobs, was dyed the same brown, though the patient’s was tangled, wet with sweat. The daughter wore a pink cardigan over a paisley button down, Christmas presents from mom, who had laughed, delighted, when she opened her present that year, which was the same. In most ways, they were reflections. 

 

The mother’s green eyes were closed. The daughter’s green eyes were open and tear-filled. 

 

She nodded to the doctor. “We’re ready,” she said. 

 

While the nurses unplugged the dozens of tubes attached to the computers surrounding the hospital bed, swiftly, efficiently, too easily the doctor ripped off the medical tape on the patient’s lips, then coolly pulled out the ridged tube that coursed through her throat and down to her lungs, ignoring the gagging sounds that alarmed the daughter and made her jump, gasping and trembling, grabbing her own throat, from her chair.

 

“Stop! You’re hurting her! Please stop! This isn’t right.”  

 

A nurse put a calming hand to her shoulder. “It’s done,” she said. “The suffering. It’s done.” She pointed to the heart and blood pressure numbers, both dropping swiftly until within seconds they reached zero and the machinery stopped. “Her heart was too damaged. It was her time.”  

 

Shattered, the daughter sobbed and stroked her mother’s hand. “Take me with you, Mama,” she cried. “I can’t live without you.”

 

From far away, she heard the doctor’s words, calm and self-assured. “You’re still young. You still have years and years of living ahead of you. Do you truly think that’s what your mother would want? For you to die too?” he said. 

 

Gasping the daughter dropped her mother’s hand and rubbed at the sudden pain radiating from her jaw to her shoulders and arms. Wide-eyed and breathless, she said, “Yes. I think she would.”