Sella

         The nurse, Beth, comes in smiling. She is a formidable woman, with an arsenal of medical knowledge and a generous girth.
         “Hey, darlin’,” she drawls in her thick Alabama accent. “I brought you somethin’.”
         Maja is lying on the bed with a coloring book in front of her, but she sits up when Beth enters, drawing me close to her.
         “Poke?” she whispers, eyes wide and fearful.
         Poke is Maja’s word for a needle—a shot, a blood test, or an IV drip. It is a word that we both know well, and though I will never be able to say it, I fear it. The “poke” itself is only a short pain, but it is also a harbinger. It can mean a surgery, a round of chemo, and more hushed voices murmuring less and less promising estimates.
         The adults think Maja never hears them, but I know better. They talk when she is in bed, behind closed doors, and outside her room, but their words filter into her dreams. She cries in her sleep, not in pain, but in fear. Maja, too, can hear her heart beating away one precious moment after another, and she is haunted by it.
         Beth, though, does not hear the hourglass that drains away inside Maja’s body. Or, if she does, she pretends not to notice.
         “No poke today, darlin’,” she laughs. “Jus’ breakfast.”
         Beth lays the tray down on Maja’s lap, and knots a napkin around her neck. “There we are. Now then, how do you feel?”
         “Ok.” Maja’s voice is very quiet.
         “Are you sure?” Beth stops adjusting the napkin and gives her a worried look. “You don’t sound so great.”
         “I’m fine.” There is a pause. “My birthday is next month,” she says. “I might be six.”
         Beth doesn’t catch the slip in her voice. Might, Maja said. Might be six. If she even lives to see next month.
         “Is that so? You’re getting to be a big girl, Maja.” Beth ruffles her hair. “You just call me when you’re done eating, all right?” She winks, and tucks me under Maja’s arm. “Take good care of Sella.” And then she’s gone.
         My name is Sella, short for Cinderella. I’ve been with Maja since she was three. I’m not any kind of beauty—just a regular, mass-produced teddy bear like any other. I didn’t come with a wardrobe or a bed or customized face. But I have Maja, and that makes me special. From the day I met her, we were inseparable. She named me after a princess, but called me by a nickname of her own invention. She took me to school, to friends’ houses, even in the swimming pool on one memorable occasion. We were like sisters, or best friends. She and I had stretching before us all the years of her childhood and more—springs, summers, autumns, and winters. We were the perfect pair: Maja and Sella, the tall and the tiny, warriors of the Amazon with mud on our faces and scrap-yard spears.
         But... nothing wonderful stays that way long. Although we didn’t know it, Maja had been cursed. The laughing, dark-haired girl who ripped open the packaging of my box on her third birthday, was dying. Millimeter by millimeter, cell by cell, the creature which lay dormant in her breast was stirring. And one day, it would eat her alive.
         Maja sits silently now, drinking her orange juice but not touching her toast. Suddenly, she puts down her cup and lifts me up to her lap.
         “Sella, what’s going to happen to you?” she asks me. “I don’t know what to do. I...want you to come with me, but I don’t know how.” I can see tears gathering in her eyes, but I still don’t understand. Where? I want to say. Where? I’ll come with you, Maja, don’t cry. But my mouth is sewn on, and I cannot open it.
         “I just don’t know!” she is saying. “Toys can’t go to heaven, Sella! They can’t even—” her voice cuts off abruptly. “They...they can’t even die.”
         She is really sobbing now, burying her face in my fur so that her braids tickle my ears.
         “Sella, Sella,” she whispers. “I can’t leave. What will you,” she sniffs, “What will you do without me?”
         I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a strange thing—so many stuffed animals fear the day that their children outgrow them. But for me, that day will never come. I will never be put aside, or stuffed in a closet while Maja runs and plays with her friends. I will not hide forgotten on a shelf, overhearing conversations about makeup and first crushes. I will not watch her lithe body trying on a prom dress; never hear her cry after a fight with her mother. I will not be unearthed the day she goes to college, and greeted by squeals of delight at discovering a long-lost friend. Maja will die before she does any of this. As she presses me up against her chest I can hear the rush of blood—millions of cells trying frantically to keep her crumbling body intact, rushing through her veins like so many grains of sand. And on the inside I...am crying.

         Maja falls asleep after breakfast, nodding off as though it were the most normal nap in the world. Her eyes fall shut; her body relaxes, bends; her breathing slows. The nurse finds her snoring, and smiles. She removes the tilting tray from the bed and tucks Maja in properly. And then she hears the cough.
         It is a deep, hoarse bark that mysteriously doesn’t seem to wake Maja, although it wracks her sleeping form. It cuts off her breath, making it too shallow, so she wheezes and gasps. The motion of her body knocks me from her arms. I cry out in my mind: No! Put me back! Let me be with her! but the nurse has already run for the doctor, and soon a crowd of people in white have gathered around her bed.
         It was too sudden, I think. Much too sudden. One moment laughing, the next dying. Why are things done this way? Who makes a perfectly healthy little girl of four collapse on the playground one day; or throw up when she’s hooked to machines that pump poison into her body; or wince in pain every time she moves, because the doctors cut her open not two days ago? I lie on the hard, unforgiving floor, and wonder.

         It is almost dark by the time some kind nurse finds me and picks me up. It might even have been Beth; I didn’t see her face. But I hear her sigh in the twilight, and the way she swallows hard as she places me in the crook of Maja’s elbow.
         No one will come to be with Maja, I know. Her father’s dead, and her mother has spent so much on medical bills she can’t even afford a ride from the factory where she works on the outskirts of town. So it is just Maja, unfeeling and motionless on the bed, and me.
         I lie, curled against Maja’s warm body, and listen to her breath. The cancer that grows in her lungs beats like a second heart in my mind, throbbing with death as proudly as the first one throbbed with life. It will steal her spirit from her, I know, like another gust of wind whisking away fallen leaves. But I will not leave her side. I, Sella, have heard her laugh, heard her cry, watched her play and sulk and suffer. I have worn the ribbons she bought me, lived in the home she gave me, carried the name she chose for me. Can a stuffed animal love? I do not know. But I do know that I will be here still when the sun sets, when the moon rises, when the clock shows midnight on its lighted dial. And I will be here when, in the dead of night, Maja’s hand finally goes cold.