With the best intentions

by @f3nix

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"A double toast! At your brilliant timing, for the second damn time."

The nurse spoke turning his gaze to the parking lot, beyond the window whose bars, swallowed by rust, had lost all their decorative hypocrisy. His cheerful lashing tone clashed with the fixture of his gaze elsewhere.

The lump of words channeled along the patient's Eustachian tubes like a sticky egg liqueur, while the neodymium lamp commented on the phrase with a quick moth’s flicker.

Through the steel bar on the side of the bed, her bleary, half-closed eyes returned to her the image of a lanky shape exiting the bedroom.

She wondered why she had only been noticed now, only now despite the endless carousel of drowsiness in which she had fallen for eons. A never-ending display of Chinese lamps, swarming with the nightmares of a painting by Bosch.

The impetus of thirst coagulated in a guttural moan, insufficient to make the sarcastic human crane turn back towards her.

The sound she emitted reminded her of a documentary with a koala, forced to walk on hot coals during a forest fire. It was something she had seen with Lucian that last night spent together before she left in secret heading to the clinic.

I had to fix it for us, Lucian. For once only, maybe the right one. And instead, look where I fucking got myself.

A sudden laugh tried to make its way. The spasms brought to her mind the horrible awareness of those tubes that, like worms, were violating her body. She had not noticed but two figures were now observing her from the edge of the bed.

"Rise and shine, Ms. White. You had a car accident just a mile away from the clinic. Fortunately, on his way back home after the shift, Valery noticed the wheels of your vehicle in the ditch along the avenue. We had to operate you urgently, a lung had collapsed and we had to contain internal hemorrhage in the abdominal cavity. It was not easy but someone up there decided that your day had not yet arrived. "

As he spoke, the doctor's eyes stared at her in dullness and, at the same time, darting with curiosity.

She would have said that some of her savior’s facial muscles - not all the necessary ones - were struggling to reproduce a slow smile. The attendant loomed from behind the doctor's silhouette, tilting his head silently to one side.

For God’s sake, tear all this stuff away and just give me a damn glass of water. Then I'll pay you what I owe you and leave.

She would have shouted at them, but the only breath filtering from her broken mouth didn't even sound like a koala moan anymore.

"Yes, I understand the curiosity, Ms. White." The doctor's eyes now reminded her of those of an abyssal fish.

"You have crossed the border and turned to us to participate in the pharmacological trials and, may I add, further to helping medical progress, you have also come because we pay fairly well."

A wet and repeated slap against the floor, in a point her eyes couldn’t reach, seemed to smear those statements along the washed-out walls. Through scarcely oiled winches, the human crane behind the doctor leaned forward in her direction.

"Well, Ms. White, notwithstanding the circumstance, you will be pleased to know that we have decided to still include you in the program. You will earn your fair compensation, after all."

Perhaps because of the narcotics, the doctor's face kept changing as if his features were playing hide and seek in the blind corners of her perception. A sound came from a low point close to the bed, similar to a badly restrained gurgle, while the doctor quietly turned away.

"You will have your money, despite your unfortunate condition or, perhaps, thanks to it," he said in a last laconic murmur.

(My continuation)

Once again, her mind went behind the sound similar to a badly contained gurgling, she closed her eyes trying to visualize its origin, but could not understand that it was produced by a dysfunction in the Eustachian tube of his right ear, a condition proper to non-human species.

Although she did not know for sure, she could deduce from listening to the murmurs of the shadows in the room, that she had become a human prototype with advanced refraction of alien origin that no one could even suspect existed.

This was not part of the agreement to participate in the Clinic's pharmacological trials, she was thinking. Her mind had become faster, but her tongue did not articulate any kind of speech, only guttural sounds.

Her memories struggled to blossom and got stuck just before opening, becoming an amorphous mass similar to an abstract watercolor.

Did she leave the clinic or return to it? Did she flee and be recaptured or simply come for the promised pay?

She was making efforts to make sense of the situation she was in, because she remembered she was running for her life when she discovered that the supposed pharmacological trials were a screen to disguise the advanced gene experiments of an ancestral alien race found in Antarctica during the installation of a super antenna in 2018, although she doesn't remember how she acquired the information, she could access it in detail if she proposed to herself.

The laughter tried to surface again. She did not understand this strange and crazy impulse in this grave situation.

Again, she heard the doctors say, "One of your lungs has collapsed, you have an internal hemorrhage in the abdominal cavity."

"It wasn't easy, but someone decided that your day had not yet come..." This phrase resounded in his ears over and over again, in different styles. Sometimes coming in and sometimes coming out like in a mystery movie.

The doctors insisted that his intentions changed in the course of the operation that would save his life, but they were the best. His physical appearance was apparently the same, although he felt broken inside. She would have a better body, according to them, but she would not have her life.

Thirst burned her insides, clouded her judgment, and her body did not accompany her to claim. No voluntary movement represented her agonizing demand: I just want a fucking glass of water, she thought.

"Well, Ms. White, notwithstanding the circumstance, you will be pleased to know that we have decided to still include you in the program. You will earn your fair compensation, after all..."

Fair compensation? Gave a deaf scream from the inside. I didn't ask to be included in this fucking program, nor did I ask to be a guinea pig in such a crazy project, nor did I ask to be the bearer of an interstellar parasite that, who knows if it devours me or nullifies.

Her eyes, apparently relaxed, showed no sign of the seedbed of thoughts she wanted to shout, but she did not articulate them. Her mind was moved by the siren songs that came and went, sounds that she did not recognize, scenes that were repeated over and over again in the shadows. In the meantime, his lodged parasite is reborn in his fixed gaze.

By Zeleira Cordero @zeleiracordero

03/12/2019

This is my entry to the Finish The Story Contest 67. If you want to participate, here are the rules

Images are from Pixabay:

Hospital by Parentingupstream
Eye by Helmut_Strasil

Banners credit @f3nix
Separators:
Cat
Simplemente Gracias

For your kind reading, simply THANK YOU

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