Lydan wrote:Coraspia wrote:Try not to cry when you're completing this story, OK? I nearly did writing it.
Your character is a 12-year old boy who has lived a very sheltered life in your capital city, going through very little hardship. He has had loving parents and a large extended family, great friends and a happy childhood, not really getting into serious trouble at school with a complete lack of personal tragedies. Until last year.
It all changed last year, when he got the message on his phone: the message was from his grandma. It was the sort of message which fills the reader with the sort of uncertain dread that makes it obvious that what happened after reading it was far worse than what had happened before: but its gentle phrasing and lack of detail left that slight possibility that it might not be so bad after all.
'Honey, tell the teachers I'll be bringing you back from school. Your Mum and Dad can't make it today. Grandma.'
Your character did as suggested by Grandma, and no words were exchanged on the slow ride back through the city traffic...in fact, it was quiet until Grandma sat him down in her cosy living room and told him in a sad, shaking voice how things had changed. Your character's mother has an illness: no one really knows what it is, but it's serious and her organs are failing. The doctors reckon that she has...maybe a year to live.
The following year was hell for your character: his mother tried to put a brave face on it, tried not to let him know how much pain she was feeling. She took him to theme parks, to see great natural wonders, to eat at some of the best places she could find, all apparently to give him a good year because money wasn't tight. But he knew why it was really: she was trying to put a brave face on it, trying to distract him from the inevitable. His father took the news less easily: many were the nights he'd hear his mothers gentle sobbing from the living room, creep downstairs and find his Dad, sat in an armchair, cradling an all-too-empty whiskey bottle, dribbling and snoring while his mortified mother stood sobbing behind him, wringing her hands in grief and desperation.
That was when the money really did start to run out: his father just didn't work, didn't have the drive or the energy. He'd get out of bed in the early afternoon, walk downstairs and sit, half-naked in that same armchair and start on the bottle where he'd left off last night. He'd tried to talk to his Dad, begged him to stop, sat up with him on the long nights crying into his shoulder but it never worked. Sometimes he managed to get him up to bed, but the man couldn't bare his wifes plees and he'd be back down in a few minutes, tv on, bottle back in his hands. For what felt like months your characters nights were spent crying into his pillow, begging to the God he'd stopped believing in that this was all a horrid, long dream.
Until a few weeks ago, when his mother went into hospital and began her most recent round of futile 'treatment.' She grew steadily weaker, her husband grew steadily drunker, and needless to say your character was stuck in the middle. Sometimes his Dad hit him, hit him and shouted at him to leave him alone...to leave him with his wife...to stop interfering.
Until tonight: when the doctors called. Say your goodbyes, was the jist of the message, your characters mother's life expectancy is measured in hours.
Woah, okay. I'll try my best. xD
The boy walked into the cold, ominous room. It seemed like death was fast encroaching upon it, but what was the boy to do? He had exhausted all of his hope and joy on this final year with his most beloved mother. He knew that there was an unbalance in her mental state and compassion. She was not like her past self, so vibrant, so colourful. It was like those colours faded away. Maybe that's what death first took. Maybe it was the colours, that gave the boy hope and happiness, that were the target of this horrible curse that was death.
Each slow step toward the bed made it feel like the boy was losing time. All of those days out, parties, laughs. They all seemed like a facade now, but the boy was too naive to understand. He remembered the time when his mother carried him to his bed late at night, she herself was getting weaker and could barely hold him, yet she continued to carry him. She never gave up, even in the face of death itself, she simply turned away and walked in the other direction. He remembered the laughing, her laugh was the only thing that he could truly recognise now. The disease had rendered her voice but a faint whisper in the everlasting cries of his family and the loud silence of his father. Her laugh gave the boy a reason to not just give up and cry himself to sleep.
Finally he reached the bed within this eerie room of death. He didn't have long, he knew he had to say something, he wanted to say something but he couldn't. He was frozen. Holding the bars on the bed, he gazed into her eyes. He was drowning in the internal screams of his soul, he wanted to release them but he couldn't find any way. Eventually, after five minutes of close staring and silence he released some sort of emotion. A lonely tear, surfed down his cheek. It crossed paths with an open cut. A cut that was one of the many signs of his father's alcoholism and impatience. As the tear glided over the cut and made contact with the small wound, it stung. But this was nothing compared to the torture that he was enduring.
Then suddenly he heard a sound. The very sound of death. The heart rate monitor... It gave out the noise that everyone in this God forsaken building dreaded. The never ending beep. It was over for the boy's mother. His heart dropped, suddenly the lonely tear that had made it's way to the bottom of his chin was not so lonely. His face burst with emotion and he could finally say the words that he wanted to say all day. "Goodbye".
You did it for me. Accepted, welcome to Atlas. We should form the 'make atlas cry' brigade.
