“Sometimes, our biggest heroes are the ones who, on the surface were no one at all. But I guarantee you, these people.” pausing, I point to the names on the truck, “And all the other people who were killed that day were all heroes to someone.”
“Ms. McCann,” Mrs. Gallagher’s eerily calm voice cuts through the end of my speech, mingling with the metallic sound of the bell dismissing class.
My stomach drops. I was off task. This wasn’t part of the lesson I submitted at the beginning of the week. There was no wrap up. I didn’t assign homework. Fumbling through my own short comings, I walk to the door, escorting out the final student on my way to my boss.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t–”
My apology dies on my lips when June drops a hand to mine. “It’s David.”
After those two words, there’s nothing but a black void of nothingness, swallowing me whole, drowning me in a sea of terror.
At first, the only thing I have is darkness. I’m lost in a world of nothing. No noise. No feeling. No warmth. No sleep or rest.
I can’t even tell if I’m alive.
If someone were to ask me how long my existence stayed like that, I wouldn’t be able to tell them.
Because there is no time.
Pitch black defines my day and night. Yet there’s no real difference between the two.
The only thing I can grasp a hold of is the numbness. There’s no pain, just this loopy sort of euphoria.
Then everything turns fuzzy, grey almost. The harsh, straight lines that look like they’ve been drawn there with a ruler and a Sharpie soften. The edges of my existence lighten, turning a dark shade of grey first, and then lighter as time—on which I still have no grasp—moves on.
Distant and almost indistinguishable, a beeping sound comes into focus. All too quickly, it’s blaring in my ears.
Then there’s pain.
Excruciatingly, my head throbs. The loud chaos of screams echo in my ears, nearly drowning out the beeping, but the constant beep beep beep, tinny and electric sounding, holds steady behind it.
The cacophony carries on. At one point it turns ghoulish. What was once a loud and mostly annoying noise turns frightening. Long fingers pull at me, clawing me toward the dark. Tension and unease vibrate around me, and it dawns on me that I’m afraid.
More hands grab at me, moving me in a direction I don’t want to go. I want nothing more than to scream, to fight back, but I can’t. No matter how hard I try to do anything, all I feel is pain. All I hear are the voices in the darkness, coaxing me to fall away with them.
Somehow, they’re kept at bay. Maybe it’s the hazy, loopiness that usually follows the most frightening of the darkness, but eventually, the noises are silenced.
The hands that once clutched at me, threatening to take me away with them, clawing and scratching at me, evaporate as if they’d never been there in the first place.
From harsh black lines, to fuzzy grey edges, my existence shifts once again. This time it changes to soft, yellow globes of light.
The hands return, but they’re different now. Rather than dragging me down, they’re lifting me up, pushing me away from them as if I’m no longer welcome.
The pain, that was once so severe I willed the ghouls to pull me under, lessens. Alleviated somehow, it becomes bearable, less damning.
Calm settles around me and the horrid sound of dying voices fades away, making way for the repetitive beep beep beep once more.
Something makes the beeps indistinguishable.
More voices.
Far less frightening than those of the ghouls, these ones are hushed, quiet, and nervous. There’s a weight pulling on them, making them somber and numb.
When I first recognize there’s a pattern to the light filling my vision, a distinctive dark and light repeating itself, some of the warmth I’d been craving returns. The pattern of numbness following pain becomes less frequent, making the sharp piercing in my head feel more and more like a dull ache.
A song plays.
Night.
Day.
The song.
Night
Day.
The song.
Night.
Day.
The song.
I begin to look forward to it. It brings me peace, bathing me in happiness.
A touch startles me. Not because it’s harsh or jarring.
But because I felt it.
For the first time in however long I’ve been stuck like this, I make a conscious effort to move. Concentrating on the soft feel on my skin, I force my brain to move my hand.
Except the connection between my brain and my fingers no longer exists. Stuck in an endless loop of commanding my body to do something it’s incapable of doing, and internally wailing at my failure, I fade away into exhaustion as night returns once again.
Night.
Day.
The song.
The touch.
The struggle to touch in return.
Night.
Day.
The song.
The touch.
The struggle to touch in return.
It’s an endless cycle. But the song.
That song calls to me on a level I don’t yet understand.
And the touch.
Bringing warmth to my frigid existence, I come to crave it and its daily return.
Movement. A response to the touch. In an electric buzz, the signal I’ve been sending from my brain to my hand works. It’s nothing more than a subtle spasm at first, but it elicits a response from the hand covering mine.
A gentle squeeze. A soft caress. A guiding voice, beckoning me to keep trying.
So I do.
A small hand fits perfectly inside mine. Wrapping my fingers around it, it feels as if it belongs there, a natural extension of my own body.
“You’re doing so well, David. Can you hear me? Please tell me you can hear me,” the voice that usually sings to me demands, covering our joined hands with another one.
There are no other voices in the background at first, only the constant beep beep beep.
“Oh, please.” Something wet falls on my arm.
My arm.
There’s feeling in my hand and my arm.
It travels up my shoulder, touching the side of my neck. When it moves over my face and neck, something in my throat feels out of place. It’s foreign enough to cease the progression of feeling returning to my body, but not so uncomfortable to halt it entirely. Following through to the other side of my body, feeling returns to my other arm and a pinch of some kind shoots through the other hand.
With a few more squeezes from the hand in mine and more drops falling to my arm, the sensation of waking up travels down my chest to my torso. Eventually it reaches my legs, filling my entire body with the warmth and awareness I’d been craving for who knows how long.
“He’s waking up. He’s waking up,” the voice repeats, growing more and more frantic. More voices fill the room. The steady beep beep beep accelerates, but the hand in mine holds firm, squeezing mine, coaching me, talking me through the flurry of activity to which I’m becoming aware.
The yellow spheres of luminescence sharpen into focus, becoming blinding white, hot rays of pure light.
“His eyes.” The small hand grips mine tighter. “He’s blinking.”
I feel movement on my other side, and the voice that once sung to me begins to cry gentle sobs of elation.
“David. Oh, God, David. Please wake up. Come back to us. Please, baby,” the voice begs. The other voices come into focus, but they’re not nearly as beautiful as the singing one. I feel the presence of other people around me, their love and warmth radiating toward me.