Wishing On A Star
Story for Intermediate writing class
I’m four years old, and I have no idea that I’m dying. I’m four years old, and I just expelled a crimson mess unto the kitchen floor. I’m four years old, and my vomit consists mainly of half-coagulated blood. I’m four years old, and all I taste is an overwhelming mixture of acid and Iron. I’m four years old, and already my body is trying to destroy itself.
Then it all goes black, well it starts to anyways, I keep waiting for it to go completely black, but it doesn’t seem to want to. Everything is spinning around me, and now finally my tunnel vision closes down, and as blackness envelops my eyes, I can only feel the deep thud of my body hitting the ground. There’s something wrong with my frail and sickly body, I’ve known it for awhile, but it all seems to become a sickening reality as I feel the cool tiles on my face. I let the world fade away, I forget whether or not I exist, and I don’t really care to find out.
Then I open my eyes, and with a rush I see the gurney I’m resting on. It was nothing like I thought it would be, it wasn’t a blinding bright, nor was there a screaming roar. It was just the opposite with the noise; it was deadly kind of quiet as I was wheeled into the brick laden building I had come to know so well, almost as if they were mourning me right there. I tried to keep breathing, but it was getting difficult now, and so I focused on the only thing that seemed to break through the wall of this silence.
“Oh doctor, doctor”, came my mother’s pleading, she was in pain, I could tell without seeing, “TELL ME WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN!”
“We’re going to help your son”, he replied serenely.
“Is it serious?”
“It may well be”.
“Is he going to die?”
“We’re going to do our best”
After that I couldn’t listen anymore, and I closed my eyes, something was breathing for me now, and I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke, it was to a cold feeling coursing through my back, and a smoothness that told me I was on a metallic structure. It was then that I saw him, the angel in the white lab coat. He was here to save my life, and he was going to try his best. Then it happened again, the tunnel vision, the blackness, all of it, except this time it took only a second. I awoke the next day and was filled in on all that had happened, I was given my new lease on life, and it was then that I learned what I no longer had to fear.
I was four years old when I died. I was four years old and for five minutes I sat, dead and motionless on a surgical table. I was four years old when an angel trying to save me, ended up taking my life instead. Yet, I was four years old when I first cheated death, and I taught him that I am a force to be reckoned with. And when I was four years old, having already lived through my death once, I learned that a second time would be far less frightening.
