So Swift Was The Departure

• Yanhao Chen, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2022

Her chest was heaving in an inconsistent rhythm, her attention dashing in and out of ultimate soliloquies, sepulchral prayers and culminating assurances whispered tenderly into her droopy ears through awkward intervals when one is obliged to involuntarily unleash a cascade of poignant tears, bitter sniffles, and sombre breakdowns on bare knees, vehemently howling and brawling, arms locked with brothers and sisters behind the cerulean-blue curtains, her eyes looping in and out from inside her emaciated skull, her soul agonisingly endeavouring to escape her frail frame into the glorious heavens above, where it will no longer be constantly constrained by physical disabilities and the shortcomings that are the characteristic of seniority gnawing at the bones. Her reptile-like skin was withered, blotchy, and shrivelled, her bones harrowingly protuberant, her sparse hair possessed more resemblance to an apparition than to a human being with ebullient effervescence, and her debilitated ogle sunk into her head like marbles enveloped by a morass. The creaking bed she was allotted with was an extemporaneous table with hastily folded, itchy, artificial-green, barely illuminated with the lemon-juice pale-pigmented flickering of a lightbulb, glitching intermittently like a coloured film under the sun’s coruscating scintillation. The balmy chamber was stitched together with a spiderweb of entangled wires, tubes, and electrical circuits over a blotched, parchment-yellow background splattered with scarlet patches, smudges, and speckles, as well as a shuffling, whispering, fidgeting throng of crouching silhouettes swathed in semi-translucent garments like divers marvelling a desiccated creature, endeavouring to discern its structure from the exanimate corpses scattered around. The enclosure of miserable souls emanated a stagnant scent of sanitization fluids mopped across the uneven floors and splattered blobs of pus languishing in the corners complemented by a jumbled cacophony of dreadful moans seeping in from the whirling vents, the stench that stimulates the visitors to dab some citrus or lavender perfume to eclipse the sanguinary obscenities. Accompanying the bitterly bleak atmosphere was a phantom, taunting the suffering mortals with their imminent destinies through ruthless whispers and booming bellows that trembled the creaking floorboards and rattled the pendant lights as it cavorted. Heinous Death was beckoning, its ominous, vociferous thunder of crows cackling, cachinnating, and cawing with sadistic glee. Her candle flickered amidst the taunting tempest of fervent emotions, her soul desperately clinging on to the remaining droplets of life as her energy trickled out of her, causing her vision to dim, her words to fumble, her hearing to cease, her twitching fingers to stagger sporadically, and her hazel-brown pupils to finally blink their last, dismissing her consciousness as the congregation of intimate family members and weeping relatives steadied themselves onto the exfoliated chamber walls for the sullen, forlorn moment. She finally exhaled, emitting a sigh of relief, and after nearly 97 years of enduring and surmounting the earthly hurdles, she was no more, asleep with no malaise, no tribulations, no age. So swift was her last breath. So swift was her life. So swift was the departure.