Blinded (Story)

Short story from the Time Out AU.

Blinded
Point of View: Bianca Akari Corbyn

The deafening sound of the bell made ten year old Akari almost jump for her chair. She hadn’t slept well last night, worried sick about her mother.

“Ugh, finally,” Aurelie sighed. “I’m so hungry, I was literally counting the seconds until the lunch bell.”

Akari picked up her bag and shoved all that was laying on her table into it.

“What did you bring for lunch today, Aki?” Lisanna asked her friend. Akari was still looking in her bag, when she answered: “I, uh, I think I forgot my lunch at home.”

Aki looked up from her bag with a small smile at her friends.

“Ah, doesn’t matter,” Aurelie answered, sticking out her hand to help her friend get up. “You can have some of mine.”

“And some of mine too,” Lisanna said.

She smiled. “Thanks, guys.” She gladly accepted the BLT sandwich Lisanna handed over, and the apple Aurelie tossed at her. Her friends were so sweet, she thought as she bit into the apple, and for a second she wished she could tell them the truth.

 

“Aki-chan?”

The soft, shaking voice of her mother was barely audible anymore. Akari had noticed her mother’s voice getting softer and softer the past days, and it made her quite afraid. She had thought about it. About what could happen. Of course, she had watched movies of people dying over cancer. And though her teacher told her that 80% of people with cancer would get better, she had only seen her mother getting worse and worse. But she tried not to focus on it, as it made her sad, and Akari didn’t like being sad.

And so, she answered: “What is it, mom?” while walking over to the hospital bed standing in the living room, wiping the tears away from her face.

 

As her uncle opened the door, Akari stormed inside, without even bothering to take off her shoes. The tears were already streaming down her face, but the sight of her, just laying over there, made it worse.

She had heard it in the car already, but it never could’ve prepared her for this.

“M-mommy…”

She held the cold head in both her hands and stared at the closed eyes, the slight smile. The watery drops formed a stain on the light blue blanket that still covered her mother’s body.

Her father was sitting there on the couch like he had been the past week. He hadn’t worked, barely slept, and never went upstairs since mom had stopped talking. He had told her that cancer had moved to mom’s head and that the doctors would do everything to take it out, but that it was really hard.

Now she finally understood how hard.

Akari felt all kinds of emotion at once. Sadness, probably, but also confusion, and regret. Regret over everything she wished she had told her mother when she still had the time. And confusion over everything that she couldn’t comprehend. How she couldn’t understand that her mother was all of the sudden… just gone.

 

“Dad?”

Akari stood in front of her father’s bedroom door, already dressed up. She looked on the watch around her wrist. It was 7:30, she was long done with breakfast and Reno could be upstairs anytime.

“Daddy, you need to make our lunch.” She knocked on the door again. “Please. Yesterday you told me it would only be yesterday…”

No response.

“Mommy is gone, dad. Please don’t leave too.”

Akari sighed and turned around. Before she stepped down the stairs, she listened one more time if she heard a sound from the bedroom.

But the hallway remained silent.

 

“Aki? Hey, Akari, are you alright?”

Lisanna and Aurelie were staring right in her face. She blinked, once, twice, to make the tears go away. There was nothing wrong, right? She was just a normal kid, a normal girl, with two normal parents. Her friends didn’t need to know. It would only make her weird. Tomorrow, she would wake dad up, and it would all be normal again. He would make her lunch like he always did. And he would bring her to school like he always did.

But there was that one voice, yelling at her that it would never be normal again. Akari recognized the voice. It was the voice that used to yell at her back when mom was still here. Whenever she told herself it was gonna be alright, it would be that voice which said it wasn’t, that her mom wasn’t gonna recover, that she only told herself it would be alright so she wouldn’t be sad. Akari hated the voice, but that was because she knew it was right.

Still, Akari shouted back at the voice to shut its mouth, and smiled.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”