Clara set the book down and looked at me, the fear gone from her eyes. Her serenity filled me with inexplicable joy, and I wondered briefly how it would feel to be responsible for the happiness of someone like her.
“How did you guess I’d be a Whitman kind of girl?” she asked playfully, sitting down on a large white settee, making room for me also.
“I don’t know. There’s Borges, of course, who loved Whitman. The rock climbing. The unpretentious way you have about you.” I swallowed, and a tingle raced over my scalp, flooding the skin of my neck and back. “In my mind, you are untamed, full of the purity of nature.” I stopped myself, turning my gaze away from her. “I’m sorry. Under normal circumstances, I would never be so blunt, but given the limited nature of our time in this room, keeping my dignity is just not enough to motivate me to shut up.”
Clara smiled, took my hand and squeezed it. “You’re a funny one, you know that? Here. Let me give it a try.” She closed her eyes and, another softly bound volume appeared on the shelf. She balanced the large solid thing while she flipped the pages and read to me.
“Hope is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops – at all -”
“An optimist? Is that what you’re accusing me of?” I asked as she handed me the book. I left my thumb on the poem she’d read while flipping through the pages of Dickinson's untitled works. I wondered briefly if there were poems here that no one had ever seen before.
“Yes,” she said, gently. “You’ve been nothing but encouraging since I arrived. Thank you.”
I opened my mouth to speak, to tell her that she had added something immeasurable to my life, or post-life, or whatever this state was, but I experienced a rapid, powerful pull, like an invisible hand grasping the top of my head, tugging hard at it. It frightened me—it was as if I was being drawn by a giant magnet. Clara caught my expression and grasped my hand.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure,” I choked out. Viktor floated into the room.
“Okay, boy. They’ve sorted you out. It’s time to get you back home.”
Clara and I stiffened at the same time. I finally understood what was happening, and a wild thing unfurled inside of me. “They’ve revived me, haven’t they?”
“Yep, but you have to get going now. We can’t hold things up for you.”
The savage thing inside of me exploded. I needed more time to talk to Clara, to understand who she was and what other things could make her happy. I needed to know everything about her, but in a place where time was infinite, ours had quickly run out. I gripped her shoulders, not caring if I squeezed too hard.
“Hurry! What hospital are you in?” I asked, my heart pounding in a way it hadn’t in a long while.
“South ... Southside General,” she exclaimed, her eyes wide with fear again.
Relief burst through me. “Me too. When I wake up, I’ll find you.”
“No you won’t,” growled Viktor. “Neither of you will remember what happened here.” He tugged impatiently at my arm with a vise-like grip that exceeded human strength.
“But I don’t want to forget.” I turned toward her, my voice breaking. “I need to remember you.”
“Rules are rules.” Viktor’s words bludgeoned my hope. “That’s just the way things are around here.”
Clara moved in a daze, following us as Viktor dragged me out of the room. When he opened the door, she came to life and blocked us from going further.
“Good bye, Thiago!” she said, hesitating before closing the space between us and pressing her lips hard against mine. Ignoring Viktor’s death grip on my arm, I wrapped the other around her and gave myself over to the abandon of kissing. My tongue grazed her soft lips, the electricity of sudden desire warring with terror when her lips parted, deepening our kiss. It was everything I imagined it would be. She smelled like summer and tasted of things that would never come to pass.
“Alright, now. Let him go. We’ve put the universe on hold here,” Viktor admonished, though somewhat more gently, while his wings ruffled restlessly. I had no choice but to release her and allow myself to be dragged toward the white door, the door that would take me home and away from Clara for all of eternity.
~~ * * * ~~
The light of the hospital room blinded me, and I thought how happy I would be if someone shut the curtains. Even with my eyes closed, the glare was strong, but I was too weak to turn my head away.
Time meandered aimlessly; the outside world entered my awareness in stages. I wasn’t always alone—I sensed another presence in the room. At length, I found the strength to turn my head and search for my mysterious companion, but I discovered an empty hospital room. It went on like this for an indefinite amount of time—the sun waxed and waned through the window, sometimes blotted by sheets of falling snow, until one day, everything took hold and I remembered where I was again.
During those lost nights, I dreamed of a beautiful dark-haired girl. Her tight blue jeans and long green sweater that slipped off her dark shoulders morphed into a summer dress of whispering softness. I watched her speak; I studied her smoky, purple-blue eyes; I listened to her laughter and the poetry of her wild soul. The dream recurred so many times that when I finally woke, I couldn’t be certain if she had simply been a figment of my imagination or a memory of a time lost to oblivion. Her name, when I struggled through parched lips to speak it, provoked a wave of loss for something I was sure I’d never had.
Clara.
I had never known anyone by that name. Yet, it was as familiar to me as my own.
I feared I would never hear it again.
~~ * * * ~~
“And a lovely Christmas Eve to you, Thiago!” said Dr. Major as he came to check my chart. My family had left for the night, much to my relief. They had spent most of the evening with me, decorating my room, serving eggnog, and watching Ben-Hur on the hospital-issued television, but I was still tired from the surgery and wanted nothing more than to settle in with one of my new books and have a good read. When the doctor came in, I gave him a polite nod, too worn out to carry on another conversation, I returned to my reading. My eyes were drooping, and I knew my Christmas Eve would soon end.
He set the chart on the table. “Let’s see what’s going on with your sutures.”
As he examined the surgical entry point, my gaze wandered over to my small Christmas tree. It was a real evergreen, potted and heavily adorned. Underneath lay gifts left by everyone in my family and a handful of friends who’d come to visit. They had been generous; it paid to have surgery around Christmas.
“How are you feeling when you walk?” Dr. Major asked.
“A little dazed, still, but I can manage it. It’s a good thing I have my ride.” I pointed toward the wheelchair decorated with tinsel and small gold ornaments.
“Mom?” asked the doctor.
I sighed sheepishly. “She loves doing things like that. She makes decorations, ceramics, pottery, and origami. You name it, she can craft it.”
Dr. Major laughed, making notes on his chart. “Well, I’ll be on duty tonight, so if you need anything at all, just give the nurse a call. You got that?”
“Got it, thanks,” I said as he left to complete his rounds.
I returned to my book. After two chapters, my eyes drifted shut. As usual, I fell asleep without knowing at what point I’d lost consciousness. I dreamed of the mysterious girl in a white room full of bookshelves that reached the ceiling. My head lay on her lap; one of her hands threaded through my hair, the other held the book she was reading to me, and even in the dream, conflicting feelings of contentment and desire wreaked havoc on me. I missed her, though I couldn’t place who she was. My confusion jarred me so much that I woke with a start, disconcerted from a melancholy that would not settle on any one thing. I was missing something integral to my very survival, but I didn’t know what it was.
I
had that sense of not being alone again. I searched the room. Assuming it was a nurse who’d come and gone, I almost missed the strange package that sat beneath my tree, one that had not been there before. Careful not to pull at my staples, I swung off the edge of the bed and slid on my slippers. I crossed the space between my bed and the tree, panting as if I were crossing the Death Zone on Mount Everest.
I picked up the package, wrapped in heavy white paper and tied with a simple gold ribbon. The purity and unwrinkled quality of the wrapping defied description. Curiosity got the best of me, and I carefully undid it.
Beneath the wrapping was a book of bound with supple leather and gold trim, entitled Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. As I returned to my bed, something tugged at the corner of my mind like a veil tightened by a rope whose knot was fast coming undone. I flipped through the smooth pages, the black letters flickering like a living flame beneath my fingers.
The veil lifted slightly, and the memory of a girl’s kiss assaulted me. As I searched the vastness of the words before me for something that would dispel the fog of forgetfulness and bring clarity, I pulled a small folded note which served as a makeshift bookmark. I read the verses before me:
“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,
he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
My hands shook as images tumbled through me, images from my dreams that appeared so real. I knew with clarity that I’d experienced them in this life, this reality. Shaking my head to clear out the visions, I unfolded the note and read it.
“Merry Christmas. Make it a good one, - V”
Like the breaking open of a sealed chest, my mind flew open. She came to me in a white room filled with books where, for the briefest of moments, we had buffered each other against our most primitive terrors. The stopped heart, the winged orderlies, the windows that looked out onto eternity, and the preposterous events that I’d not only lived but also shared with another soul—a soul that had become so rooted within mine, even the spell of amnesia couldn’t keep her from appearing in my dreams.
I mashed down the call button that lay next to me on the bed, impatient to resolve everything. Dr. Major, who had not left the ward, came rushing in, expecting to find who knows what.
“Are you okay?” he asked, scanning my face, searching perhaps for signs that my frailty had caved under the pressures of my still-healing heart.
“It’s Christmas Eve, after all. Would you like to grant a wish to a half-dead man?”
~~ * * * ~~
She was nothing like I remembered her in The Waiting Room. Unconscious, she lay on a bed similar to mine, her arms and legs suspended in a prison of white plaster casts. Her head was bandaged, the luxurious brown hair in a tangled disarray on the pillow. Dr. Major was right: she’d suffered nearly fatal wounds and it was a miracle she’d survived.
It both shocked and filled me with tenderness that the beautiful, witty girl I’d met in Purgatory was the same one who lay broken before me, the stark white of the hospital linens highlighting each purple bruise and angry contusion. I desperately wanted to take care of her, tell her we’d somehow delayed entry through the blue door a little while longer; tell her everything would be all right.
Something captured my attention, drawing me closer to the bed. Next to her unbandaged arm rested a book like mine. My hands shook at the realization that a volume of Emily Dickinson's poems lay open as if she had fallen asleep reading it. In her small hand she clutched the corner of a slip of paper. I knew, without her having to open it, who it was from and what it said. Even then, I had a kernel of doubt: it wasn’t every day that people met their soulmates in Purgatory.
As I absently stroked the pages of the book, her eyes fluttered open. The quick intelligence, which had captivated me from the moment they’d settled on me in that strange, immortal room, lit up her face. My heart, which could not endure the force of so much expectation, sputtered painfully in my chest. She blinked several times to clear her vision, the dim light of the lamp perhaps too harsh for her. I stood from my wheelchair and carefully switched off the light over her bed, leaving us in the half-glow of a small fluorescent light above the sink across the room. This movement drew her eyes toward me. I was close to bursting with happiness, grateful to whomever had designed the universe for decreeing that I should belong to her. For at that moment, I understood why my life had been given back to me.
If only she would remember.
“Merry Christmas, Clara,” I said slowly, resting my fingers over hers.
She searched my face briefly. A flash of confusion erupted, then passed over her like a gentle wave. The recognition transformed her, and she gave me a tired smile. Her hand floundered weakly as she said through parched lips, “Merry ... Christmas ... Thiago ...”
~*The End*~
To HQ. All it takes is a woman and a pen to make the angels sing.
And to the editors and organizer of this collection. Coincidentally, they are women with pens, too. ~ ST
~~ * * * ~~
About the Author
Sera Taíno was born to Puerto Rican parents in New Jersey. She writes romances featuring the kinds of women she grew up around. Sera currently lives in Florida with her husband and two sons, and teaches English Lit by day. A voracious reader as well as an avid outdoors person, she’s often torn between curling up on a sofa with a cup of coffee and a good book, and taking off for a long run on the trails around her house.
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FORTUNE FAVORS THE FELINE
Elizabeth Langley
What would you do if you got exactly what you wished for?
What if your best friend wasn’t who you thought he was?
Olivia has looked for true love her whole life. She just didn’t know it was always there, right by her side … demanding to be fed.
When a birthday gift leads her in a familiar, yet different direction, will Olivia let down her guard and let love win?
(m/f; heat level: smoking)
FORTUNE FAVORS THE FELINE
Olivia Beresford had finally decided to give up on fairy tales. Up until now, she believed she would find her happy ending. Despite every disappointment, heartbreak, and horrible moment that had left her crying into her pillow, she had still woken up, brushed herself off, and found the sunny side of the situation. Each disaster just meant there was one more step to take, one more trial to live through until she met her Prince Charming. Only, today, she’d begun to wonder if she was a little delusional.
Sighing heavily, she sat down on the couch to eat some leftover chocolate. Her cat, Henry, jumped into her lap and purred, rubbing against her chest. She stroked his fur and grumbled, “Just you and me tonight, sweetie, as always. At least I know you want my attention.”
Henry blinked, his green eyes gazing at her intently. He meowed softly and shoved his head harder against her chest. She snorted and pushed him away. “Pervert.”
The way her life was going, her cat would wind up being the only male to show her affection. No matter how much she adored him, attention from Henry wasn’t nearly enough to soothe her heart. She wanted a family—a real human family. Exhausted with the single life of horrible speed dates and swiping left, she just wished her true love would show up so she could start building the life she truly desired.
Pounding on her front door pulled her from her thoughts, and she rushed over to open it. Her two best friends, Mirabelle and Janie, poured through the doorway, singing different off-key renditions of “Happy Birthday.”
Olivia laughed in delight. Her neighbors would probably be furious about the noise this late at night, but it was exactly what she needed to bring her out of her funk.
Mirabelle grabbed an annoyed Henry from Olivia’s arms and thrust a large, professionally wrapped package into her hands. Janie handed her a small, obviously hand-wrapped box. Olivia grinned. Despite her friends’ differences from each other, they were perfect for her. Showy and stylish, Mirabelle was loud and brash, whereas Janie was quiet, earthy, and calm. However, tonight, as she handed Olivia her gift, singing and laughing, she seemed downright obnoxious and loud.
Olivia shot Mirabelle an accusing look. “Mira, how much did you make Janie drink?”
Mirabelle rolled her eyes and aggressively scratched Henry’s back while he stared piteously at Olivia. She giggled and reached over to scratch him under the chin, temporarily appeasing him. All her friends loved Henry, but he barely tolerated their attentions. He preferred to stay close to Olivia whenever anyone visited.
Mirabelle huffed. “I didn’t force it down her throat, Livy. She wanted to enjoy herself tonight. It’s Halloween! Since you didn’t want to go out and celebrate with us, we figured we may as well go celebrate for you. I mean, it’s not every day you turn thirty-one on the thirty-first.”
“God, don’t remind me how old I am, please,” Olivia groaned. She turned to Janie and cooed, “Janie, sweetie, are you feeling okay? You look a little wobbly.”
Janie flashed a brilliant smile. “Yesh! I’m great,” she slurred. “Never felt better. Hurry up and open your presents.”
Olivia shot Mirabelle another quick glare and said to Janie, “You should probably sit down.”
Moonlight, Monsters & Magic Page 18