Drowning Out Of Water

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

Tick-tock, tick-tock. The clock sounds steadily behind her ear; it trains her thoughts to the relentless pound of its rhythm. Don’t think too quickly, it beats to her yet it refuses to slow her heart rate. The sterile aroma of the hospital waiting room clings to Graces skin and holds her close to the fear she feels within herself. Still dressed in her damp swim suit, a cap mark branded on her forehead and a pinch where her goggles hold her nose, she shivers under the breath of the air conditioning.

Both sides of her head pulse. The twin tanks in her chest, usually ablaze with exertion-always startling and familiar against the hug of cool water and chlorine, so exhilarating-struggle against her breast. Let me out, the panic cries fast in her chest. Built for stamina, Grace could breathe easier in water than in this waiting room. The only calm she can feel is in the reliable strum of the longer hand and the silence that comes between. /Just focus on the clock. He’s going to be ok-/

Crash, a loud clatter to her left. Awakened from her remedial spell, neck snapped by a child’s noise in the waiting room’s ignorant play pen. The pins and needles under her skin fuse her bare legs to the not-quite-leather chair beneath her. Her bubbling stomach rises to her awareness, an unnecessary addition to the hazy flashes of the accident. But her brain soon catches up with her eyes where blocks of Lego overwhelm the size of a wailing child. She looks away into her lap, again seeking steady calm in strikes of time.

Red. Blood under her fingernails. It catches her eye and startles her skin, red-brown against white. Memory floods her thoughts and drowns the sound of the clocks sobering rhythm. She is lost to the feel of his matted hair against her arms; chlorine in her nose, the coarse, sticky towel imprinting her palms, imprinting his forehead. How her fingers slid against the keypad of her phone, slick and red and shaky because it shouldn’t ever be that hard to press three small buttons. But it was that hard… Talk to the operator, coherent sentences, shake him awake, warmth, pressure on the wound, don’t scream, don’t think, just do. How did she stand up let alone rush into the ambulance? How did her legs not give out from underneath her? The python of fear sliding between her ribs, wrapping around her heart, squeezing...

‘…his daughter?’ A stranger in a white coat invades her vision. Relief rolls over her as the crinkly-sad smile of the doctor saves her from her memory. Her throat is sand. Useless, she throws her head up and down jerkily. Bones crack between muscle as she rushes to her feet.

‘Follow me.’ Frantic, she walks the hall and follows the tail of the white lab coat. It waves under his strides and blurs to merge with the starkness of the floor. When the coat stops flapping, she startles and stops, heap up and eyes flickering to the threshold of the open door.

The doctor mutters sentiment but it fades into the hallway. She knew she wouldn't have made it to his door had she not felt the dreadful tug in her chest, overriding the sickness in her stomach, throbbing for a sight she already knew would be devastating in its entirety. She tries past the doctor and inside. Barefoot and drowning out of water, a husky familiar voice stirs within the room and pulls her from the deep end. Inhale.

‘Grace?’ Alive.

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