Knocking on Heaven's Door | 𝐒𝐀𝐌 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑

7 - THE TEMPEST

Sweat loitered on Bellona's forehead when she woke, tainting her pallid skin with its sticky residue. It had become part of her daily routine, ever since the diagnosis. To wake up, legs entangled - suffocated - amidst the constricting waves of her white bedsheets, convoluted into arrays of wrinkles until their grip left no room for the movement of her limbs. It almost seemed as if they, too, wanted her dead.

Not just that sickness that crept through her body. Not just the wraith that insisted on conquering her brain, lobe by lobe, slowly, steadily, until it reigned victorious over every vein and artery inside of her.

The doctors called it Stage Four Glioblastoma. Cancer. They'd looked upon her with a borrowed empathy stealing across their eyes, only to harden moments later to inform her of the costs. The symptoms. That she'd likely experience headaches soon, and nausea, and that she now owed them four hundred dollars simply because they'd informed her of her impending death sentence.

There was no cure. Only a prolonging of the inevitable, and for that, Bellona insisted that she didn't owe them anything at all. They'd handed her death on a platter. Not a feast. Not healing. And certainly not hope, or any other deed that deemed them worthy of her money.

Bellona wondered when her daydreams had turned into nightmares.

She'd once been a girl of sunlight. A sunflower, per se, yearning for nothing more than to soak up the rays of every sun she rotated around. Her mother, Summer, her classmates. Sam. She used to consider it a hobby of hers to roll in the grass like a child, traipsing across both meadows and grassy plains alike until she got lost in the fantasies of her mind.

Now she was a girl of the coldest hour of night, and she knew it. She saw it in the coloring of her bedsheets, in the linen that used to be as white as the first snowfall of winter, but was now tarnished with a sultry yellow. It was the color of the sweat that peeled off of her like an old skin during the night, and the color of a dreary autumn. She used to think the chilly season was a warning sign of endings and the new beginnings that would follow. She knew the truth now. It was no more than an end - of spring, of life, of the gentle whisper of a summer breeze as it brushed across her cheek. No new beginnings would follow.

At least, not for Bellona Wesson.

Most people would give their souls to have their future laid out for them in stark lucidity. Bellona would never have to. Not when she had it so near, lying like the silhouette of a corpse at her bedside, resting on her nighttable until she picked the wretched papers up and passed it to her doctor to confirm her next appointment.

It was unexpected. It was cruel. And it was her reality.

Even so, she refused to believe that what her mother had said was true. It couldn't have been. Agnes' words of an ethereal bloodline, Hestia's curse, and a pendant that had the power to defeat death - it was all nonsense, the consequence of delusions. Her claim that Bellona was sick, too, had just turned out to be a lucky guess.