Blog # 7: Jess Yaun

This is an excerpt from my novel, still untitled.



When she woke again she was in a hospital room, drugged, the pain barely there. Her dazed eyes wandered and then landed on the chair in the corner. I sat in that chair not too long ago. But the room was not the same and there were no flowers on the table beside the chair. When she had sat in a chair just like that one, she had it pulled to the side of her father’s bed. She had held his hand and spoke to him in hushed, lullaby tones that he had once used to soothe his only baby girl. She remembered how she watched her tears land on his hand, willing each tear to be the drop that woke him. When he did finally wake from his coma he only lived one day. They didn’t have to tell him his wife had died in the accident; he said he could see her in the corner, beckoning.

That was three months ago. Three months and Rebecca could not recall what she had done during those long days. The funeral was a blur. When she thought of it she saw still images: the caskets, side by side, being lowered into the ground, the blown-up picture of her parents, smiling and holding each other, set up in the church. Her parent’s friends and colleagues had milled about the house for a few hours after the service, and one by one they departed, leaving her in the empty house.

“She’s awake.” Rebecca’s eyes drifted toward the door. A doctor came following after the nurse and came to the bed, chart in hand. His eyes were dark and kind. He flipped open the chart, then looked back at Rebecca. He began to speak and Rebecca tried to follow what he was saying but the words seemed to float away from each other, one word dropping on the bed, another floating up to rest on the black TV screen.

The nurse checked the IV in her arm, and adjusted something on the monitor. Rebecca closed her eyes and fell back to sleep, only to find herself back in her dream. She was lying on a low cot against a mud wall. The air was filled with smoke so thick she could barely make out the figures standing around her, but she could see the bright painting on their faces, red and black designs along their cheeks and foreheads. A man started chanting and placed an assortment of pebbles, pouches, and crystals along her body. A woman put something on the hole in her side, an ointment that was both cool and warm at the same time. She felt no pain.

The man with the crystals whispered in her ear, “Chant with me child, if you can.”

She heard herself make strange sounds, felt her voice rising and falling in unfamiliar rhythms that dipped and swelled in her throat. She closed her eyes and let the chant run over her body, imagining it as a cool liquid slipping through her veins. The figures in the hut began chanting and swaying and stomping their feet until the very air seemed to reverberate with their rhythm.

She opened her eyes to find the hole in her side had begun to spark, little red and orange lights darting right out of her body and into the air - swirling once, twice, before fading into the smoke. The skin on her side felt like it was being gently pulled though no one was touching her. She was amazed to find that she was not afraid. She closed her eyes again and surrendered to the movement, and breathed deeply, the smoke filling her lungs but not making her cough. When she opened her eyes again she was back in the hospital room. She tugged the hospital gown up and looked at her side. The wound was gone. All that remained was a small brown circle, like a spot of paint.