The end of dreams

33

"I am afraid the time has come for her to be relieved of all pains" said the doctress, in a low voice, on entering the room. "You knew this would happen. Only this way she'll find the courage to... let herself go".  
Anna was taken to the infirmary. She had fainted soon after she had greeted her daughter for the last time, just a second before they put Michelle into a medically induced coma.
Mark did not move away from her, although the doctors had advised him to try to relax his mind for some hours; maybe he should go home, as the doctors had told him. He would do that, of course, but not so soon.
"You'll have to force me out!" he had growled, so nobody tried to bring him round.
Silvia, for her part, had sunk back into the catatonic state she had taken refuge in only a few hours before. She had to switch off her brain to survive. 

"I had hoped that the escozul..." Andrew let slip those few words, which practically revealed his secret, as soon as the doctors put Michelle into induced coma. 

He hit one of the walls of the corridor with all his might. He thought there was nobody around him but Diamond had heard him as she was casually passing by him at that very moment. 

"I knew it had been you" she said, hugging him- Silvia was even unable to get amazed when her mother told her about it some minutes later. She did not even try to thank Andrew since she was totally lost in her infinite sorrow.

Yet she would be grateful to him for the rest of her life. That was the only thought she could hold for a few seconds. The fourteenth of september came and nobody abandoned that bed, least of all Silvia whose last possibility to have an abortion was on that very day.
The day had just begun dawning when a blast of wind entered that small room in the hospital, although the windows were all closed. One of the numberless doors of the corridor slammed and the pot with sunflowers that gave colour to the room fell to the ground violently, without breaking into pieces. The flowers, on the contrary, scattered everywhere.
All the people in the room turned their heads toward the pot; they had been scared by the sudden noise and were more or less awake now.
An instant later they looked at Michelle to make sure she had not been frightened.
But she had stopped wheezing just a few seconds before. They saw her turn pale till she became as white as the snow.
A smile blossomed on her lips.
That is how Michelle passed away, with her skin as white as snow, and her lips as red as coral.
There she lay, like a little Snow White: she looked as if she was sleeping serenely in her glass case.