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Occasionally, she’d wake up and look around, then slip back into unconsciousness before she could work out where she was.
There was a dull, ever-present sound, the beep-beep-beep of some medical machine close by. There was a smell, too. Antiseptic. Plastic. Unnatural.
Faces came and went. Some she recognized, some she didn’t. All men. There was a stern-looking one she couldn’t remember having seen before, and a handsome, soft-eyed guy who she wassureshe knew, but she struggled to name.
Sleep. So much sleep. Long stretches of oblivion. And always there, in the background, a worry that next time she closed her eyes, she might never open them again.
But, luckily, she did.
And then she opened her eyes. And this time was different. She was there, all of her.
Esmeralda pulled herself up onto her elbows and coughed a couple of times. It felt as though she hadn’t coughed in weeks. As she moved, she noticed that she had a tube coming out of (or going into) the inside of her elbow. It was hooked up to some kind of drip.
For a paranoid moment, she wondered whether she’d been kidnapped, drugged, and kept here against her will — wherever “here” was.
It was a dark, cozy room. Blinds were over the windows, and weak sunlight lit a far wall. There was a print on the wall: a large, beautiful, abstract painting. Was it a landscape? Was it just a few patches of color? The painting had appeared in a few of Esme’s dreams, as a backdrop to the surreal goings-on her subconscious had thrown together.
“Hello?” Her voice was weak and small. As soon as she spoke, she had a dreadful thought. What if this was TwistOfFate43’s place? What if hehadcome to her house and had drugged her?
Panic again. That horrible, acidic, stomach-churning rush of terror.
Esme heard the rhythm of the beeps on the machine next to her increase, getting faster and faster until, to her surprise, it let out an alarm.
There was a noise nearby, and then, a moment later, the door swung open.
To her relief, she recognized the figure.
Wearing a tight-fitting black t-shirt and thick blue jeans, it was Rainer.
“Esme? You okay?” His eyes, as soft and kind as she remembered, were full of concern.
“I… think so.” She winced as her head throbbed. “My head hurts.”
Rainer stepped forward. “Yeah, that’s gonna happen for a while. The doctor told me.”
“Doctor?”
“You don’t remember?”
She shook her head.
“Fuck. You were awake. Seemed fully lucid. He was asking you questions. You don’t remember any of it?”
She screwed up her face as she tried to concentrate. It was hard, like she wasn’t in complete control of her brain. Thinking shouldn’t be this dang hard. Eventually, a memory did float up from somewhere inside her.
“I thought that was a dream. Did he have a beard?”
“He did.” Rainer was grinning. “I’m glad you remember. He said that there might be some short-term memory issues.”
“What happened?”
Rainer put his hands on his hips. “Well, young lady, for the second time in two days, you bumped into me. Only this time, you happened to be riding your scooter.”
It all came back. The intersection. The panic. The awful, wrong-feeling crash as she’d collided with Rainer’s bike.
“I’m sorry,” she said, rubbing her temple with the hand that wasn’t attached to the drip. “It was all my fault.”
“Well, lucky for you, I’m not going to be suing you.” It was a joke, but Esme didn’t really feel like laughing.
