My first short story! This is a bit dark, and I don't usually write things like this, but I hope it's alright.
Do or do not?
The air was filled with a desolate silence, allowing the two opposing sides of my consciousness to argue incessantly, the choices ringing loudly in my head. Both of their arguments were chains around my wrists, restricting each other with moral persuasion.
The clouds hung oppressively low, as if, to mock my own troublesome load with the invisible burden they carried, shrouding my mind in the fog of indecisiveness as I walked around the Hospital garden. The garden consisted of a few lowly rose bushes and a single bench. A pathetic sight for happiness, at least, in a situation like mine, where the only thing that seemed to process through my limbic system was confusion and disaster which can falter a persons perception.
I glared at the vapid white walls of the building, which were bound to be the place of my unredeemable and immediate future. Do or do not? The question mocked me with a harsh and abrasive sentiment leading me further into the abyss of despair and confusion.
I am, in the very word, damned no matter the choice I choose. Both choices are roads diverged in a yellow wood, only none have yet been traveled. My fate is sealed in damnation, bestowed unto me with a force that was not of my choosing.
Before my brain could justify a choice completely and before my mind was made up the hoarse voice of my father rang out. "Felicity, she wants to see you." I turned to see his red, swollen eyes. The tears stopped for a moment, but as he scrutinized my face the water works began again. I flinched at the onslaught of emotion, only creating matters worse for my own emotional hell.
I hurriedly entered the hospital, leaving my father trailing behind me. The smell of antiseptic was strong in my nostrils. I was sure if death had a smell this was it. I made my way to the hospital room, greeted by the sound of machine induced breathing, and high beeps measuring heart rate. I walked to the bed and stared into the face of my twin sister Fiona. Her blue eyes were wide and alert, staring intently into my own. She breathed heavily as the machine pushed oxygen into her weak lungs.
"Please." She wheezed in a voice almost inaudible. My fingers started to shake as a reminisced about the time she was first put into the hospital, a few months ago, for rare condition. The name escaped me at this moment. It was a paralysis, I remember.
The paralysis spread like a slow poison through her system, starting with the limbs, the bones, and the muscles. When we told her what was wrong she had asked me, with the most courage a fourteen year old could have at that time "When the paralysis deteriorates my body to the extent I can't be apart of the living and moving world, will you set me free?" I didn't know what she meant, or I just didn't want tow know. She continued anyway with a certainty that had stuck with her ever since.
"This illness will eventually kill me. Felicity, please, promise you will cut of my oxygen so I can no longer breath. I can no longer thing, and when I can no longer think I will be free of my biological cage. Set me free when the time comes, I don't want to be trapped in my own body, watching the world go by me, and waiting for the moment my mind will shut down so I can no longer think. Please promise me." I was not able to answer her when she asked me, I sat and stared at her, mutely, then she was rushed off into the hospital room, leaving me alone to fault myself for a sickness I could not control.
That was the last time I talked to my sister, it had only been a few months and her body had deteriorated faster than expected, she lost the ability to stand, quickly, then to sit, then to move.
I was her twin, why couldn't I have the paralysis? Out of the fifty-fifty chance, Why couldn't it have been me? Fiona was the favored one, she got straight A's and was the worst overachiever in the word, she was perfect and I was average, in the kindest of adjectives. Yes I might have been the creative twin but in reality creativity is not the key for permanent success.
"Please." she croaked again. There was a cool and wet substance sliding down my cheek, my vision blurred and I knew I was crying. Looking at Fiona was literally looking at a mirror image of myself. This girl had been the closest of friends and an even closer sister. We had shared so much together and I loved her with my heart, we were half of each other, and now she wanted me to take her life, which would be the same as taking half of my own.
"Why wasn't it me?" I whimpered, the knot in my stomach clenching, threatening to keel over. My chest compressed with the weight of it all and for a moment I hoped that I was taking the sickness from her and putting in myself. Sadly it wasn't.
Then among the two choices, the two arguing sides of my brain, came a third. It was Fiona, the echo of her voice, the favor she was asking of me. "Set me free, release me, I don't want to die like this." I exhaled a few times, bent over and kissed my sisters head. Her eyes would be teary and wet if she had the ability to cry. I walked and turned off the oxygen, the life support, the only thing that kept her alive.
It wasn't a choice of life or death, which I would think is an easier one. It was a choice of when to die. Do I let her suffer in thought and agony until she can no longer think or see? Leaving her last memories ones filled with longing and despair? Or do I let her die, knowing that she can be free now, that she doesn't have to go through the torture of the disease?
Her eyes fluttered shut and her breathing slowed, her lungs stopped working, her chest stopped moving and after a few minutes her heart had stopped. She looked as if she was asleep, but I knew she was gone, and in some sense healed. She was no longer held down by her body, yet half of me died with her. Is it murder, when you are asked to kill, and the person asking is the victim? If the answer is no, then why does that word burn itself into my soul? But I did it, and in the moment of decision, I chose Do. What would you have done?
