Victim Of Circumstance

• Emily Campbell, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2008

Can you hear me? I’m still here
Dull Lilac orbs, heavy with tears blink up into the blurring illumination of the hospitals artificial lighting. The figures are blurring into wavering silhouettes.
Not Death though. He instead has become grotesquely familiar, every color intensified as my world starts to slip into darkness. He rests one steady hand over my heart, forcefully prying my mind apart so he can read every thought, every desire, and every struggle to fight the darkness. As each second passes he becomes clearer and reality turns around to bite me.
People who see death…
“Are you responsible for him?” Nurses don’t care about me. All they really want is the money my families paying. Funny, to think I always wanted to be in medicine.
“You are? Sign here then” I can faintly make out paper being passed from one person to another “We’ve run out of time. I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do”
They’re time is up…
Somebody scrawls something onto the paper. The nurse nods and I feel hot tears well into my eyes. My death warrant. It’s like an impossible equation, one that gives you the same answer no matter how you write it. “I’ll tell the doctor to remove the life support’
No! I desperately try to scream, to reach out for the Nurse’s fleeting back but he closes the door behind her. I nearly choke on the white tube in my esophagus, stinging with tears.
//You must think I’m a horrible person. Now, now let’s not get selfish. You think you’re the only one to go this way? Your aren’t the first and you wont be the last//
//Why should they bleed to keep you alive? //
Death grins sadistically down at me, his crimson eyes burning, filling my head.
//But isn’t this what you wanted? To be free of the living? Save your breath they can’t hear you. Your mine now//
I can’t scream, can’t move as they slowly remove the machines keeping me intact in the world of the living. I try desperately to twitch, blink, and move but if they can see me they ignore it. I can hear nothing as the machines measuring my pulse are shut off but the sobbing of family members, the very same ones who signed my death warrant and Death’s insane laughter, filling the room, ricocheting off the walls as he opens out his arms to welcome me. What stopping me from taking it?
I know you hear me!
But there’s something else. My heart, thundering in my head, pounding at my ribcage. Filling my ears, my head, and my mind. Death is eerily quite. Then I can hear his furious screams, sounding in time with my heart.
I’ve done it! I’ve cheated death. But death is a part of life. Ignore it and it dosen’t go away. Far from it
Limbo. Reaching for life or death. Straining, but never quite able to grasp either.
But always in reach of him.