This is from a short story I wrote for school. I have continued working on it and it is now a full length novel. Hoping to have it published one day. Enjoy!
Prologue
Maddy sat in the stark white waiting
room. Her hands balled up into fist on her lap. She hadn’t seen a mirror in two
days, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that her gunmetal
grey eyes had dark circles and bags under them. She was beyond exhaustion. She
glanced over at the empty coffee cups that littered the side table next to her.
How much had she had in the past eight hours? It was at least a cup an hour.
Possibly more. The procedure was only supposed to last three hours, but they
ran into complications an hour in. With a small sigh, she stood from her seat
and started pacing. She had been doing the back and forth between parking it
and running a hole in the flooring for hours.
No
rest for the weary, she thought.
She started her route at her chair;
straight forward to the vending machines, hanging a left to the television,
another left to the magazine stand, and rounding it back to her chair. She had
done this so much that the floor seemed to just carry her. In truth, she didn’t
want to walk, but she knew if she stayed seated for too long, her exhaustion
would win over and she might miss speaking with the doctors when they came in
to tell her about Joey’s progress. The thought of his small smile made her stop
midstride and forced her to brace herself against the vending machine.
Oh,
my little Joey, she thought.
She looked down at herself trying to
find an anchor to keep her grounded. Her faded jeans and red blouse looked like
they had been slept in, which of course they had been. Her curly, brown hair
was piled up high on her head in a messy bun. She traded in her sneakers for
slippers two days ago.
“I’m going to be here a while. I
might as well get comfortable,” she had told Joey. Joey smiled back at her,
only taking his eyes off of his notepad for a moment. He had been scribbling
furiously for sometime but refused to let her see what he had been working on.
She drank in his profile as he wrote. His smile hadn’t faded the entire time
he’d been in that God awful hospital.
Her little Joey. He was such a brave
little man, always smiling and laughing, with the playfulness of youth dancing
in his eyes. Maybe it was the optimism of a child that kept him that way. He
was always positive about everything. He always urged her to see the silver
lining. She wondered idly a few times in the past if he actually grasped the
seriousness of life. Wondered if he would ever grow old enough to grasp it.
She made one last turn and threw
herself back into her armchair. Putting her hand into her front pocket, she
pulled out the piece of folded paper that Joey handed her before they took him
off. She began unfolding it when someone walked into the waiting room.
“Ms.
Johnson,” Dr. Tucelli’s deep voice reached out for her. Taking a deep breath,
she braced herself.
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