Labyrinth--Chapter One: The Clock

Lisa Atwater was lying on the hospital bed, staring blankly at the clock on the wall. No light filtered in through the blinds of the windows, the sky an unchanging dismal gray. The light blue walls brought no warmth to the setting, nor did the white hospital sheets, or medical equipment beside her. She didn’t move, only tapping her finger in rhythm with the clock. She stiffened; each tick was painful, echoing through her head and striking her eardrums. Tick. Tick. Tick. Each precise tick, counting down the moments until she would finally fall asleep and never wake up again. She wondered which tick it would be. She didn’t care. She hoped it was soon. Tick, tick, tick.
In some distant corner of her mind, Lisa could hear what was happening around her. Doctors, patients and nurses walked around outside behind the wooden door, footsteps sounding from the halls. There was the muffled voices of her parents, and a nurse. There was the sense of their concern. Hopelessness. Lisa breathed slowly; the fear had left long ago, and hopelessness was the only remnant. She didn’t care about dying. Everyone died. What she didn’t like, though, was the fact that everything hurt. Blinking, breathing, sitting, shifting. Each tick. If she were to die, why couldn’t it be something where she could move? Where she could live out her last days well? Lisa had heard of people with life-threatening illnesses doing things like skydiving and deep-sea-diving, no longer afraid of losing their lives. Unafraid of the inevitable.
Now lying there, she wished that was her case. She wished she could move. She closed her eyes, imagining falling towards the earth from a plane or exploring the vast unknown mysteries beneath the surface of the waves. Wind brushing her cheeks, or shining silver fish rubbing her sides. No. Never. She was succumbed to the small blue room in the hospital, seeing glimpses of livid sky between the blinds.
A smiling blonde-haired nurse named Marie pranced into the room, carrying a tray.
“Hello, Lisa!” she said in a chirpy voice that reminded her of an overly-peppy sparrow skipping on the ground as it pecked for seeds. “Ready for your afternoon medicine?”
Afternoon? Since when had it been afternoon? She could’ve sworn it had been morning moments ago. Lisa’s questioning ice-blue eyes shot towards Marie.
“Don’t worry, same stuff as yesterday,” she assured with a false smile, like one you saw from a beautiful bride-to-be who had just poisoned her fiancé’s drink. Of course, Marie had no reason to kill Lisa, or to lie that it was something other than what she’d had yesterday--as though Lisa could even remember that far--but there was another sense of falseness behind it. An implied falseness. A smile ensured that “the sun would come out tomorrow.” The nurse knew, however, that this was not the likely the case. The chances were slim that Lisa would even see another sunny day, especially with the late-November weather outside. If the sun were to come out tomorrow, it was probably an illusion. Just another vivid hallucination. To see the sun was as likely as her chances of waking up well.
The doctors were mystified by Lisa’s strange and ever-changing condition, one they couldn’t really pinpoint on one disease or another. Some days it acted like a stroke--she would have a short seizure, then later awake to find her mind clear of memory. Other times it acted like fever--a temperature that shot up to 100, 103 degrees, Lisa moaning and vomiting, face hot. Then, there were the terrifying days. Days of hallucination. These dreaded days came in various intervals, sometimes happening only for moments, or hours. Other times for days. These days, Lisa saw shadows flash across the walls, saw images of people crying, falling to the ground, dead. Sounds slashed her ears and movements tore her skin. She wouldn’t sleep, only murmuring multiple times little words of gibberish, or speaking sentences that had no relevance. Often she cried and screamed. Other days she didn’t speak and hardly moved at all. But in all cases, she hated the clock upon the wall and it’s terrible tick, tick, tick.
Still, she didn’t want the clock removed. All day she watched the hands work their way around, each day she closed her eyes and listened. Listened for the sharp little sound most ears wouldn’t even be able to catch. Lisa listened, and every time heard. Time was leaving her. It was moving on.
Don’t go! she wanted to cry.
No reply.
Just a simple tick, tick, tick.