Songs That Voices Never Share
It turns out that all those books she used to read, all those movies she’s seen, they got it all wrong. There is no brilliant white light at the end of the tunnel, and her brief life never flashed before her eyes. There was just pain. Crunching glass, rending metal, blood. So much blood. It ran down her face and got in her eyes, blurring her vision and making it hard to breathe. And pain. More than she would have ever thought possible. So when the world got tired of throwing her around like a rag doll and the darkness started creeping in, she was actually thankful.
So there was no white light. No choir of angels. So her grandmother wasn’t waiting for her with open arms like she had so often been told as a child. At least it’s over.
Except it’s not. Nothing good can ever last. When things finally start coming back to her, it’s slowly, in bits and pieces. The steady beeping is the first to sink in. It’s right next to her head, but it may as well be at the bottom of the ocean. The pain is still there too. It feels like somebody took a rock and split her head open. She thinks she ought to just reach up and push it back together, but no matter how hard she tried, her arms wouldn’t cooperate.
Her lungs are burning, and each breath she draws in makes her entire chest ache, and she finds herself praying for that darkness to come back. It was warm there. Safe and comforting. Nothing like this place. Through sheer willpower and determination, she manages to part her lips, but nothing actually comes out, aside from a barely audible whimper that may have just been her imagination. Her entire body is betraying her.
Except for her eyes, it would seem. It takes only a few minutes of trying to get them to open, and she immediately wishes she hadn’t. It’s too much. Too bright. A bolt of lightning straight to her brain and somewhere the beeping quickens. Like an alarm clock trying to pull her from this nightmare. But there was no waking from this.
Then came a sound of thunder. Footsteps on the floor or a whole herd of elephants stampeding around her head. Taking a moment to steel her nerves, she opened her eyes again, just a crack this time. A blurry figure stood over her. Writing something on a clipboard. Their mouth was moving like this blurred half person was talking to her, but the word seemed to get lost before they actually made it to Quinn. She tried to speak, to ask for the darkness, her old friend, back but her throat still refused to work.
Tires squealed suddenly across the floor, and finally her body reacted, flinching instinctively away from the sound. It’s not tires though. No, not tires at all. A chair. Being dragged across the floor and closer to her bed. It takes all the strength she can summon to turn her head enough to look, and even when she manages, everything is too blurred and broken for her to be able to make out a face. It’s like looking at the world through a fractured pane of glass. Without warning, blood starts rolling thick and fast down her cheeks again. Only this time it’s not blood, and she doesn’t think it’s fair that crying is the only thing she seems capable of doing without effort. But it doesn’t matter now, because there’s a muffled voice and the darkness is coming back and suddenly they’re tears of joy, because soon she won’t have to feel this anymore.
Somewhere a hand closes over her own.
Somewhere she hears her name being called.
Maybe , after everything she’s done, she had this coming to her. Good little girls get rewarded, and bad little girls?
They get pain.