Terrestrial Alien ✔

Chapter 27: Sundering

"History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done."

- Sydney J. Harris

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Joshua

The hospital waiting room is just as I remember it being. Terrible.

It's an awful, discordant mixture of bustling nurses and groaning patients and the stagnant people waiting, picking their nails and checking their phones and jiggling their knees as they impatiently await news. Like me. I'm one of the waiters.

The walls are decorated with framed stock photos of flowers and made of a plastic that has a 90's-esque design scrawled over it. It looks like it would fit better on a disposable paper cup or on some child's crayola artwork.

I haven't been allowed to move from the seat the nurse had dumped me in after checking on me. I've found myself slowly unraveling the hem of my shirt as I wait, tugging on a loose string as I try unsuccessfully to break it off. My knee bounces and my heel thumps against the carpet with nervous energy I can't quell. I haven't seen nor heard of Seth since they rushed him into the ER, and the nurse whom the paramedic had handed me over to didn't even have to look at me long to determine that I'm hardly fatally wounded.

He'd given me some water for my throat—smoke inhalation, he'd said, expect soreness, moderate swelling, and so forth—and diagnosed me with a mild case of shock. For that he'd forced me to lay on his little medical table, watching me until I could concentrate on his gentle, impersonal questions well enough to answer fully and coherently.

And then he let me go, and here I am. Playing with a string from my shirt and trying not to chew a hole through my lip as I just... wait. I don't know what to do with myself.

While Seth is over there clinging to life somewhere, I'm over here, the cause of it all, not even truly injured... I sink deeper into my seat with a terrible guilt heavy in my chest.

I want to be in there with him, I want to know if he's alright, I just want to know... But I can't, I can't go in there, and I struggle to keep myself here in this waiting room to wait.

Continuously seeping into my awareness are memories that only agitate me further, memories of sitting in a waiting room like this nine years ago, waiting for news on my mother's condition, any news at all. A glimmer of hope, maybe. Something. Anything.

I shake off the memories as firmly as I can.

Other memories slink in in their place.

The weight of a bat on my shoulder, the crack of hitting...

Abruptly I startle out of the recollection, and the woman sitting next to me gives me a funny look as I swallow shallow, shaking gasps, gripping the armrest tightly beside her.

Pushing myself up from the chair, I distance myself from her, walking briskly towards... somewhere. Anywhere. I just can't wait in that chair any longer.

I'm here because of my own actions. I know that. And yet... It's still hard to fully grasp everything that's happened today. My phone has been buzzing with notifications and calls ever since I stepped onto the ambulance, so much so that I had to turn it off. I just couldn't bring myself to handle it. Any of it. I haven't even checked to see who it is texting and calling me.