Happy Birthday, Ta! Also, A Story

I know that I promised I would write an article next, but today I was mowing my lawn and thought of an idea for a story that I really loved. Word of warning--this is a large deviation from my other current story, so don't be alarmed.

No Regrets

--1--

Clayton looked fondly around at his family. He breathed deeply—the air tasted packaged and thin—and began to tell his 34-year-old daughter that he loved her.

“Annie, you—.”

His sentiment was interrupted by a cough that felt perfectly normal. He cleared his throat, smiled, and began to speak again. But he could not speak. He tried to clear his throat again. Another cough, but this one tore his chest to pieces. There was pain, but then it was gone. Clayton faintly felt a ribbon of blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth.

His last thought was of sunglasses.

There was no fade to black. There was no bright light at the end of a tunnel to go towards.

Clayton Kelly, who was born in Belle Fourche, South Dakota in 1949, sat up in a hospital bed 61 years later in Rochester, Minnesota. He was clad in nothing but a dressing gown, and the blood which had coated it moments before had vanished from the material---it was now perfectly, blindingly white. It hurt his eyes to look at. Now that he thought about it, everything was a little too bright, even though the shades had been drawn.

His room was completely empty. That was the first thing he noticed. The flowers and balloons which had littered his bedside table were gone. There wasn’t any medical equipment in any of the drawers—they were completely bare, as was the exam counter, which had been barely visible underneath the countless jars of cotton balls and boxes of latex gloves just hours before. His heart pounding, Clayton got out of bed and walked down the length of the wing, confirming what he had already suspected--every room was just as empty as his. His breaths coming in short gasps now, he half-walked half-jogged to the nurses station, the crux which seperated the East and West wings of Mayo Clinic.

It was utterly barren, as Clayton knew it would be. Only a few bleached-white counters remained.

Clayton walked back to his room, his mind racing. The hospital was abandoned--but the lights had been left ablaze. There were no people. When he stood still, it was perfectly, horribly quiet. The basic foundations of all the rooms were the same—the beds, tables, chairs, and nightstands all sitting exactly where they had before. But everything else had vanished. It was as if something had come and taken everything which had not been bolted down.

Clayton blinked. Someone, he corrected himself.

Entering his room, he was unsurprised to see that pure-white silk sheets had replaced the yellow-gray blankets which had covered him for those four, hellish months as he waited to die. Perhaps if he had not been caught up in his thoughts Clayton would have remembered that he had torn the sheets from the bed when he had gotten up to investigate, and would have found it odd that the bed was perfectly made once more upon his return. But he was, and he did not.

Not knowing what else to do, Clayton Kelly sat down heavily on his deathbed and wondered if he was alive.