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Young Writers Society



When the Storm Comes

by Sonder


“Hey, Kat. Tell me a story.”

Jace rolls his head to the side to face me. I’m startled at how his hazel eyes seem to positively glow against his dark skin, when the rest of his body is so weak and washed-out, dulled by illness. The bags under his eyes from sleepless nights, his sunken cheeks and wrinkles in his forehead from the constant stress, his muscular arms that used to engage in wrestling competitions, just lying limp on the hospital bed, never to move again... all of it is so unlike him. Jace is a sickened shell of the strong young man I once knew.

I’m struggling to recognize my own brother.

I pull my uncomfortable plastic hospital chair closer to his bedside, flinching at the screeching noise against the tiles. Jace just blinks at me, waiting for a reply.

“Sure thing,” I say, my voice overly cheerful. I hope he doesn’t notice how his state unnerves me, but the dark look in his eyes suggests otherwise. “What story?”

“I don’t know.” He shifts back to stare at the ceiling again, the pillow rustling under his head. His voice comes out like a low sigh. “I just want to remember stuff, get my mind out of this room. And I like your voice.”

I straighten up in the chair. He’s right. The least I can do is to get his mind out of the hell he’s going through.

I clear my throat, trying to think of a proper story. “Do you want it to be a memory or made-up, J?”

He doesn’t respond for a moment, focusing elsewhere. But then his face crumples. “I...I just tried to shrug, Kat,” he whispers, eyes still fixed on the ceiling. His lip trembles, but he doesn’t say anything more.

I know what he means. Nothing happened. His body hadn’t responded. My eyes moisten, but I refuse to cry in front of him. It’s hard enough for Jace to be a new quadriplegic. He doesn’t need me weeping over him.

With an effort, I ignore the devastated look on my brother’s face and declare, “I suppose I’ll go with a memory.”

Jace nods slowly and closes his eyes tight, the pain of reality weighing down on him.

I take a shaky breath and wrap my cold fingers over my forearms.

“On your birthday, there was a really bad snowstorm,” I begin. “Mom had been in the hospital for about two days, and Dad got Gramma to come and watch me.”

“You remember that?” Jace murmurs.

“Yeah. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought Mom was dying. Honestly, I thought she had gone to the hospital because her stomach had exploded.” I snicker at the thought. Jace’s lips twitch upwards the tiniest fraction. A good sign.

“Everyone was acting so weird. Happy, but stressed out too. I remember, for the longest time when Mom was pregnant, I would just watch the snow falling outside the apartment because she was too sick to play with me, and Dad was always at work. The day before Mom left, that was when the snow really started coming down. I think they called it a blizzard later. I can’t remember. Either way, it helped to keep me entertained until our parents got back. And when you came home,” I pause and smirk at the memory. “I thought you were a rat or something. I didn’t know that babies could come that ugly.” I laugh, remembering my three-year-old self’s confusion.

Jace opens his eyes to slits, a small smile working its way onto his face.

“You thought I was a rat?” he says indignantly. “You’re just saying that.”

“Nah,” I say, smiling down at him. “You looked like a wrinkly brown rodent.”

“I did not.”

“You did,” I snort, poking him in the lower arm, delighted that his focus is on something other than his condition.

But to my dismay, the tiny smile slips from his face as his eyes focus on his arm, where I had touched him. My own grin falls as I realize where his thoughts had gone. He hadn’t felt it. We couldn’t even physically fool around anymore.

Obviously, the same thought had occurred to him, and his eyes flutter shut once more.

Desperate to keep his spirits up, I struggle to conjure another memory.

“I was really disappointed when I found out that you couldn’t play with me when you got home. In the months before you arrived, Mom had told me that a new sibling would play with me and that we would be best friends. But when you got home, you couldn’t do much. You would just lay there.”

Like you do now.

My breath catches in my throat. I hadn’t meant to imply that. I hesitate too long, cursing myself for the comment that could have been taken as an insult.

Jace’s soft voice cuts through my self-reprimands.

“But?”

“But...” I swallow painfully, force myself to relax. “Then she was right. When you started to crawl, that was when the fun began.”

A nurse pops her head into the room and check Jace’s IV. He grimaces at the intrusion, her presence yet another reminder of how he was not okay. She smiles sadly at me and fiddles with the tape holding the tubes in his veins. I’m sure it would hurt, with her pulling at his skin like that, but he can’t feel that either.

When she leaves, he breathes slowly, then asks in a pleading tone, “What kind of fun did we have, Kat?”

I say the first thing that comes to mind. “You had this obsession with dog food, you know.”

Caught off guard, Jace opens his eyes in surprise. “What?”

I grin at his reaction. “Yeah. Remember old Gracie? The schnauzer?”

Jace smiles uncertainly, my question coming out of nowhere. “Yeah?”

“Mom always left her food on the kitchen floor, right? When you learned how to crawl, you’d always make a beeline for the dogbowl, every chance you got. It was my job to make sure you never got to it.”

Jace raises an eyebrow, amused. “Really?”

I laugh. “Oh, sure. But you were so determined, every time I would pick you up from the kitchen when you almost reached the bowl, and put you back in the living room, you’d be right back at it again. You were on a mission.”

Now Jace laughs, the bright tones of his voice ringing clear through the room. It’s breathier now due to his injury, but it’s a laugh nonetheless.

“Guess I had great taste,” he snorts.

I push forward, thrilled with my accomplishment. “I decided to make it a game. I was four, so I was getting tired from picking you up over and over. I wanted to see how obsessive you really were about getting to that dog food, so I started putting obstacles in your path. Chairs, pillows, anything I could find. You were really good at going around them. I hardly slowed you down at all.”

Jace shakes his head, smiling. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“You did. But here’s the best part. That’s how you learned to stand, and eventually walk.”

He turns his head to me in surprise. “But Mom said I just--”

“Pulled yourself up on a chair. But you know why you did that?”

“Why?”

“She had put the dog food on the counter for once!”

Jace laughs again, louder this time. “My gosh.”

“So here’s my conclusion.”

“Stop.”

“I think you were a dog in another life. Would’ve fit you better.”

“Kat!” His chest heaves with restrained laughter before he calms and relaxes his neck, breathing hard. He looks me in the eye, still smiling but serious. “I mean it, no more jokes for now. I’m getting tired.”

“Oh.” I had forgotten about his weak respiratory system. While he hadn’t damaged his spine high enough to need a machine to breathe for him, he still couldn’t use much energy for feats such as laughing.

“Keep telling stories, though,” Jace encourages me. “You’re good at it.”

“Hmm, what else is embarrassing?” I ponder aloud, before pushing back my chair and wandering over to the hospital window. The fat snowflakes dancing down to the concrete below reminds me that Jace’s fifteenth birthday is next week. My baby brother, so old already.

And paralyzed for life.

Jace speaks up from behind me, “There was that one time when you called the police when I was just sleeping hard. Do you remember that?”

I roll my eyes and turn away from the window. I glare at his dark head peeking above the covers.

“That was so embarrassing, J.”

“You thought I was dead.”

“You sure looked like it. And afterwards I wished I was.”

“You could’ve checked for a heartbeat, just maybe.” Jace grins, his teeth bright against his skin. “Pulling an all-nighter can knock someone out pretty good.”

I come over and sit on the bed beside him. The metal frame squeaks loudly.

“I didn’t know about that stuff then, you dork. You looked dead, so you were dead, in my mind.”

“At least you cared.”

“It was still horrible,” I giggle.

We smile at each other for a little while, then lull into silence. A clock nearby seems amplified in the sterilized quiet of the hospital. Jace shifts his head, his black curls swishing against the pillow case. I fiddle with the bedsheet, wishing with all my heart that we could be back at our house, with not a care in the world.

“Kat?”

I look up from watching my brown fingers wrap themselves in white cloth. “Mmm?”

Jace’s hazel eyes have taken on an intensity I’m not accustomed to.

“You’ll always be here for me, right?”

His face is so earnest, and I realize that he’s anxious about my answer.

My eyes dampen without my permission. I usually never cry, but here my body seems to look for every excuse to. I reach out and grip Jace’s motionless hand, even though I know he can’t feel it. His hands still feel the same, the muscles still tight around his bones, as if he could still reach out and pinch my nose like he used to.

“Always. You’re my brother, Jace. I won’t leave you.”

His lips turn up in a bitter smile. “You don’t feel obligated? Like... I couldn’t stop you from leaving if you got sick of me. I could end up alone here and no one would care but the nurses who are paid to keep me alive.”

My heart feels like it’s being strangled as I struggle to speak. “You’re my best friend, Jace. I love you. I don’t care if your arms and legs don’t work anymore, you’re still my brother. Nothing and no one can take that away from me.”

His face relaxes a little bit, and he blinks violently to prevent tears from spilling over. “I know,” he says, his voice cracking. “I don’t know why I said that. I know you love me, Kat. I know you’re my friend. I’m sorry.”

A tear traces my cheek, and when Jace blinks again, a droplet lingers on his cheekbone as well. I grab a tissue from the bedside table and dab his eyes, then my own.

“We’re in this together,” I tell him firmly, my voice stronger than I feel. “I won’t leave you alone to deal with this crap. You were my first friend, you are my best friend, and together we’ll get you through this.”

“I know, sis,” Jace sniffs. His lips turn up just the slightest. “You can be the arms and legs of the operations, and I’ll be the brains.”

“Okay, sure,” I agree, then realize what he said. “Wait a minute...”

Jace snickers softly. We fall silent again, and the wind howls outside the building. Flurries of snow are carried past the window in gusts, and the two of us watch the weather serenely.

“Is it true? Was I really your first friend?” Jace murmurs, eyes fixated on the white storm outside.

“Of course,” I respond. “Even if you looked like a rat, I loved you from the moment you came home.”

“Aw. Now I want to ask Mom how ugly of a baby you were.”

I ignore his comment and continue, “What was nice was that you kept getting smarter, and I could teach you things, and eventually we reached the point where we were partners. And that was when I knew you were my friend. When I was able to talk to you without saying anything. When we are able to talk for hours, like we have been today.”

Jace smiles contentedly. His eyes flutter closed, probably from exhaustion. He’d exerted himself a lot during our conversation. “You’ve always been my friend, sis. Sometimes I wanna strangle you, but you make a great partner in crime. We’ll take on the world someday.”

I stand up and kiss him lightly on the forehead.

“We already are.”


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29 Reviews


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Fri Mar 06, 2015 1:37 am
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TheElderOne wrote a review...



A fantastic piece. One of the best I've read during my short time on the site.

I love how you emphasize that he can't do things fully capable people take for granted such as shrugging or laughing or feeling another's playful poke. It really brings out the fact that he's struggling to adjust to his new condition.

The brother-sister relationship was also touching, and the reminiscence about their child years made the conversation relevant to a reader if he or she has a younger sibling. The nervousness of the narrator in the beginning is also realistic when she thinks that she has offended her brother or sees the nurse fidget with the needles.

The detail and dialogue are spot-on, and I like how the dialogue is conversational yet descriptive enough to give the reader a clear picture of what had happened. That's a very hard balance to find.

As for a flaw in the story - which is hard to find - I could point out that commas aren't needed for ending dependent phrases even though no one really cares about that. That's the only flaw I could see. Don't worry about it unless you're writing academically, though.

Anyway, keep on writing!




Sonder says...


Thanks so much for the review! I really appreciate it. I tried to make the characters realistic and portray a disabled person as a person. Thanks again! :)



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Mon Mar 02, 2015 4:39 am
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flyingwaves wrote a review...



This is a wonderful and magnanimous story .I felt the theme was truly stupendous. I must say that it was simple plot but was well executed both literally and dramatically.The portray of a three year old girl that was amazing...the way she described the young fellow as a rat evoked a sense of innocence in herself...it was able to create a comic mood in this sentimental story.This story takes the reader to strong feeling of family relationships especially the one between a sister and brother....altogether the story is really good and well written...




Sonder says...


Thank you! Welcome to YWS!



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Mon Mar 02, 2015 1:16 am
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SweetMarie wrote a review...



This was really very very good. I think this is a fantastic way of entering back story on the characters, and furthering the characterization of them now, particularly by having them interrupted by the nurse, and commenting on how that makes him feel in the current situation. I was hooked as soon as you did the thing with trying to shrug. I thought that really was fantastic. It broke my heart, it really did. I wonder (this is just me) if maybe you went on a little bit too long, or did too many stories about them as kids.Again, I honestly really loved it, but I think you may have gotten carried away with the amount of little cute stories you did.

But, to argue against myself, a lot of times this is how people actually remember things, once the floodgates are open, they keep going. But, I wonder if it may get boring to some. Still, as I said, really well-edited and crisp. I think you have a lot going for you here, and I hope you keep writing!




Sonder says...


Thank you! :)




"Do not try to be pretty. You weren't meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Don't let anyone ever simplify you to just 'pretty'"
— Suzanne Rivard