Enchanted Moon
By
Homar Solano
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Copyright© 2012 by Homar Solano
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Chapter 1
My name is Kayla Moore. And I have been feeling really strange lately. Probably how I am feeling right now has to do with the old saying, ‘curiosity kill the cat,’ because two days ago I was really active, going to school, hanging around with my friends, reading gossip magazines, and eating double cheese burgers, which I always eat two. But then, all in a sudden, everything change. I got sick and right now I am in a hospital.
It all happened in a sunny Tuesday, when I came out of school and found my mother, Lara; my grandmother, Suzanne; and my father, Roger, doing a little cook out in the patio. It was then that I decided to invite my friend Maritza to come over; anyway, her house was about fifteen minutes away from my house. But instead of taking my bike, I decided to walk to her house, but on my way, I came to stumble upon a hole. It was an eight inch size hole.
The hole was as dark as a piece of charcoal. I could not manage to see anything. Without thinking, I bend down and with my right hand I try to reach for anything. I grab on something really soft that send chills all over my body. When I try to pulled it out, it grab my fingers really hard, immediately I let go, but the thing would not let me go of my finger. At this time, my mind entered in a state of shock, and my fingers came to be really heavy. But within a reaction coming from my scared mind, I shook my hand with all my might, falling down to the ground.
My right hand felt like hot red fire, consuming itself. I wasted no time and pressed my hand soft against my lips, massaging it. Meanwhile, my eyes started delivering hot salted drops of tears, dropping directly into my right hand.
My chin now started itching so much that it had turned more like a rash, but I didn’t know if it was because I had been massaging my right hand with my lips more and more as the pain incremented, or was the pain that was making me feel that way, yet I scratched myself with my left hand and brought my hand before my eyes. My hand’s fingers were completely filled with red blood. As I looked around the floor and turned my gazed around myself, and saw blood all over me, my head started, churning, thundering, and hurting as my vision blurred against the view.
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At eight thirty-four p.m., I opened my eyes and found myself on a bedroom, in a hospital, surrounded by my grandmother and father. My father hesitated to hug me, and I just started crying like if I hadn’t seen him in a year. My grandmother grabbed my left hand and started rubbing my fingers.
“Honey, how do you feel, do you feel much better now?” my grandmother wanted to know, looking at me with watering eyes.
“What happened with me?” I asked, raising my bandaged right hand, “and why do I feel weak?” I argued, wiping up my tears with my left hand.
“What happened, sweetie, is--”
“Roger, stop, she doesn’t need to know what happened. What she needs is to coup up right now!”
“Suzanne, she needs to know!”
“Grandma, for god’s sake, please let my father explained what’s wrong with me!”
“Kayla, apparently your hand was chewed, although the doctor said it looks more to him like being shredded by some kind of animal, but don’t worry because the doctor already send a saliva and blood testing to the lab to verified what kind of creature could have done this, what is worse yet, is that you are missing your thumb and index finger.”
“Roger, son, you don’t have to be that rough on her, gosh!” Grandma scolded my dad, looking at him with a menacing anger.
“Ooooooh, nooooooo—my fingersss!” I started crying impulsively, sitting up on the bed, bringing my legs up so that I placed my head between them.
“Kayla you need to relax, come on, you are going to live, that’s a great opportunity,” my dad try to reason with me as he slightly shook me.
The doctor came in and checked on me, he made a sign to my dad that he needed to talk to him outside of the room. They went outside; meanwhile I stood with my grandmother.
“Where is my mother! I want my mom, please grandma, I want to see my mother--” I pleaded, while my eyes came almost down with the big torrents of tears they were cascading.
“Kayla, please, relax. I know this is hard for you to assimilate, but please, honey, relax. This is the only thing I am asking of you. Your mother wasn’t feeling quite well, that’s why she stayed home, because she didn’t want to make you uncomfortable with her being sick,” my grandma tried to convince me.
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The doctor at St. Revival Hospital looked at my father to the eye, as if his blue pupils were going to froze everything he watched. He put his black, ball point pen in his pocket shirt, standing straight up, taking big gulps of saliva, and positioning himself to say something really important.
“Mr. Roger Moore, it hurts me to notify you this but, your daughter has only two hours to live.”
My dad’s body began shivering as if he had transferred himself to a place with freezing temperatures, his skin turn hard and his feet felt really heavy. His gaze felt down to the floor.
“I am sorry Mr. Moore.”
“This can’t be happening to my only daughter, the one I admire and love. You must have mistaken yourself for another girl!”
“I am sorry Mr. Moore, but my file papers indicate Kayla Moore from room 105, which is your daughter. This is indeed her, so there is no mistake.”
“But how did this come to be, sir, explain this to me right now!” my dad hit the wall against his fists, then he bend down to the floor, and sat in the floor crying like an infant, his nose filling up with mucus.
“I am sorry again Mr. Moore, but when your daughter got here to the hospital she had already lost a lot of blood, plus whichever creature did this to her, not only got her two fingers but also direct veins coming from her heart. I did everything I could to save her, but unfortunately, since the beginning she had no remedy, I am sorry.”
My dad entered the room crying and wiping his tears. He walked really slowly, his face looked really saggy old, his eyes were shrunk in, yet his back was no longer straight up, but hunched up, and his gazed was totally lost in the room’s floor.
“Dad, where are my fingers! I want them back now, make the doctors fix my fingers, dad!” I cried.
“Kayla, come on, relax, please, I know how you feel, but--”
“Kayla, honey, your dad will do everything he can do to fix you; you know that he always does what’s better for you, right?”
“But this time is my fingers grandma!” I cried endlessly, smearing my face sideways into the right pillow that was covered with the white sheet bed.
“Kayla the doctor told me that he is going to fix your fingers, although not today, because first you need to rest, and were better than in the house, that is why I am taking you home today.”
“Dad I am starting to feel really worn out, really. I feel dizzy. If you want to take me to the house then take me, so at least I can see my mother and receive her attention.” I looked up closed to the door where he was standing, but my vision blurred as my eyes got a glimpsed of the light.
“In a few hours baby, just a few hours,” my dad rubbed his eyes and then pressed his hands hard against his head as he emotionally commented.
“No! Dad I want to leave right now! At this instant!” I argued, with a cry in my voice.
“We can’t leave right now Kayla; we have to wait for the doctor to authorize your leave,” my dad looked into my eyes, his expression strained with a lot of anxiety, which made me insist no more.
My father found himself a chair and sat there watching me, while my grandmother got inside the bed with me, patting my head and telling me nice stories about her knitting me a sweater with my name in it that she had kept it a secret until now, and her being the one that was going to help me find a boyfriend without my dad knowing it, and once home, she was going to find her recipe book and make me a hot soup, composed of three kinds of meat: chicken, pork, and duck.
With my grandmother still inside the bed with me, and my father now standing at my bedside, while my white paled face looked towards the ceiling, with my skin being really cold and tremendously shivering and convulsing, my eyes crying acidic tears, and my mouth coughing roughly, I looked at my dad, but I didn’t know any more if he was alive or paralyze as I found him still staring at me, but as I was about to turn to my grandma’s gaze, a hard pain struck me in the chest, a total blackout; I was pronounced dead at St. Revival Hospital at eight thirty-four that same night, only having the age of twenty-four.
Chapter 2
Suzanne sat on an old bark chair, pressed against her abdomen was a table, and a typewriter placed on top with a bundle of white sheets of paper. She typed rapidly with a deep concentration, moving her fingers and sinking them profoundly, tapping her left feet each time she type, against the recently furnished wooden floor.
Mr. Roger sat on the living room watching television. The only problem was that he wasn’t watching or hearing it, but only using it as a special effect to cover his grieving. He would have hated it if Lara heard him crying from the other room, since he was the only one trying to lift her spirits up. So he cried as he counted every dollar he had taken out of his bank account for her daughter’s funeral, while the news anchor announced the five most important international news of the day.
Lara slept all curled up on her bed; her forehead was full of collected perspiration she had gained during all midnight. Her body trembled roughly from side to side. It seemed as if her naked body had suffered dehydration as all the bed was damp of her constant sweating. And her throat gave loud speeches that resembled phrases of another language.
Rushing through the house and almost falling down with a concrete flower base, which was in between the kitchen and the living room, Suzanne stopped and turned back the other way to her room, as she watched Roger making a phone call in the living room, he swirled his hands and broke up crying, pleading for something she couldn’t quite make the words out.
Roger walked out towards the door after he had hung up the phone, but before exiting he dug into his pocket pants and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and took one off, sliding it through his mouth, and then bringing on, from one of his buttock pockets a lighter. The flame on the lighter dance like two little persons, embraced into one big flame. Then it went off, evaporating inside the lighter.
As Suzanne heard the door shut, she waited a couple more seconds to pass by the living room just to make sure Roger had completely left, and then she came out of her hidden room. Once she peeped good into the window, she hurried up to her black Buick and choked the gas pedal hard. Twenty minutes later, a square simple building with big letters reading ‘postal office’ came into view.
She got out of the car and didn’t even mind looking over her sides to check if any cars ran towards her way. She rushed forward to the postal office and, since it was a Tuesday, there wasn’t even a person in line, so she hurried up to the counter and placed a white cardboard envelope to first class Mail Express, tapped her fingers on the granite counter, and watched the clocked as the mail lady weighted the enveloped.
Paranoia already overtaking herself, she locked down all four doors of her car while she drove, and when she reached the house that had housed her ever since she had arrived from L.A, ten years ago, she jogged towards the door, almost falling down, but swinging herself back, recovering her balance. She took her keys out, but the door wouldn’t even bulge. Feeling nervous and strange, she decided to checked her key out, but didn’t found any abnormalities, the key was straight up, not bended or nicked.