Inspired by true events, “Prediction” brings forth the timeless question “Are we in charge of our own lives, or our destiny already is forged upon us?”
Excerpt
Five days after her falling accident, Polly was admitted in the Children Hospital’s ICU in downtown Athens, unexpectedly. When Martha entered Polly’s quiet room, her daughter was asleep and connected to a machine, her breathing aided with an oxygen mask. She approached Polly’s bed, as a doctor and a nurse slid through the door behind her, and she was startled to see them there. She looked the doctor in the eye, desperately seeking for answers.
The doctor told her that Polly wasn’t doing well, and his diagnosis sounded bleak: “Pulmonary edema due to thickening of the blood that was caused by internal hemorrhaging.” In medical lingo, he was telling that the inevitable was about to happen, which medical science couldn’t even explain in simple words. Why couldn’t the doctor be a little simpler, a little more compassionate? Martha thought his conclusion came through like a severe verdict on her child’s life and on her own from a higher authority that she already had dismissed; because no authority was above a mother and her child. But why people were so cruel to them? Why didn’t they give them a break? She was puzzled, as usual.
The doctor assured her that the medical staff was doing everything possible to care for her child, but his reassurances fell short. Martha had learned that diplomacy had no part in her life; that in the big scheme of things, seeing black and white made it easier to see the world as it really was. As far as she was concerned, this was a matter of life and death, and there were simply no excuses for the imminent loss of an innocent child.
As the doctor stared at her with a hint of compassion, she let out a primitive howl, and her screams echoed eerily across the musty walls of the old institution. She wasn’t prepared to lose her daughter, and she preferred to lose her mind before she lost another child. The world had failed her once again. Who are these people to tell me that my child is going to die? Why I feel so helpless after what I’ve endured in my whole life? Why I am not stronger now?
She moved toward the doctor, threatening and begging him at the same time, and the nurse injected between Martha and him, and she grabbed Martha’s hands with all her strength, and an assistant was summoned to help restraint her. But soon they figured the small woman was only a bundle of nerves on the verge of a nervous breakdown, not a threat to them, and they let her go, pushing her back away. They left the room, and Martha collapsed in a leather chair across from her daughter’s bed. Her eyes were fixed on Polly, and Martha looked at her little girl with different eyes. Why it has to be my Polly? Why my daughter? Her beady eyes glowed, and Martha looked insane. She was losing her mind, sinking slowly in the abyss.
In the next few hours, medical staff barged in the room and tried to comfort the little girl, checking her vitals on the machines, checking the IV connection and her bed covers. Martha sobbed as she watched her daughter dying a slow death and felt lonely and desperate. There was no one there to support her, no one to help soften the blow; she was facing this horrific experience alone.
The night arrived painfully slow. At 8:17 p.m., a nurse asked Martha to leave the room, as doctors began to descend on Polly’s bedside, and Martha left reluctantly to wait outside the room. As the commotion intensified, staff rushed into Polly’s room from every direction. Martha turned to them tensely, attempting to get answers, but no one cared to acknowledge her. She peeked desperately through the cracked door and saw the commotion by her child’s bed. So many doctors were there, but no one seemed to be able to help her daughter. Now she had lost all faith in doctors and in God and in everything else, real, or imagined. She hadn’t been much of a believer, anyway.
She heard a doctor pronounce “We lost her!” and Martha slammed the door open and rushed to Polly’s bedside before anyone could stop her. Her worst fears had come true.
“Polly!” she yelled out as loud as she could.
The monitor by Polly’s bed registered a flat line; her little girl was gone.
Andreas cried so much that he felt his head would explode, and he couldn’t remember when he had cried so intensely and for so long before in his life. He was inconsolable. He didn’t have a chance to say good-bye to Polly, and he wasn’t going to see his sister again for the rest of his life. The naked truth stabbed his heart, like a blade. He wasn’t sure whether their sudden separation scared him more than the finality of Polly’s death, or if it was both of those things that scared him like he was never scared before.
His thought of the love that he had shared with his sister comforted him in the end. That love was still with him. There is always something left, he figured; love no one can take away, not even death. He learned of Polly’s passing and the events at the hospital from his mother and relatives who rushed to the hospital too late to be useful for anything. None of them was capable of reversing what was happening to little Polly, and the little girl’s fate was sealed from the moment she left the house for the one-way trip to the hospital. His aunt Alex, Martha’s younger half-sister, brought the sad news home, delivering it bluntly in the open, evoking instant roars and bitter tears from him and his siblings. They had lost their beloved sister; an important part of their childhood was forever gone, shattered as instantly as the news was delivered.
Andreas was relieved that his parents did not ask him along to the cemetery for the funeral service. Somehow he always could impose his will on his parents, especially in moments of crisis, when he got serious and his dark mood signaled that he wasn’t to be denied what he asked for. He couldn’t bear the thought of looking down at Polly’s ashen face in her small coffin, the priest sprinkling oil and dirt on her before the lid was slammed tight and her coffin was lowered in the ground. He preferred to remember his sister as she was in the old days,alive and happy,and he vowed to keep her memory alive, as death could not break the bond and diminish the love he shared with Polly. That thought, whenever he fished it out of his conscience, filled him with hope; it ensured he maintained his sanity in his insane world.
Holding Elena by the hand, he headed to the store to buy refreshments and came back to see the first guests returning from the funeral service. How quickly everything had happened; faster than the speed of light, it seemed. Andreas knew all about traditions and customs, and a child’s funeral was no less a time of tradition. According to custom, relatives and friends stopped by to offer their condolences and get hospitable treatment in exchange for their participation in the family’s grief. And the custom in this case went like this: his family was obliged to serve all guests bitter coffee and sugarless cookies for the occasion,even cognac. At some funerals, families even served fish soup to entice guests to offer consolation and take part in their grief with utter sincerity. Fish also signified that after their period of mourning ended, they were to forget the dark moments of Polly’s passing and look forward into a hopeful future, remembering only the good memories of the young girl’s life.
Andreas hated the reminders of Polly’s passing: the service protocol, the hardened faces of strangers, and the depressing black garb that people wore. How he wished to be able to empty his mind and forget about all the bad things that happened, to be able to rewind his life to its starting point, to bring back his sister. But he couldn’t do any such thing. He could not reverse life, for life always moved forward and never stopped.
His mother and sister served their guests as his father wandered through the small house smoking packs of cigarettes, on occasion poking light fun at others. His awkward attempts to lighten the atmosphere did not succeed, and Andreas realized what others did not: deep down, his father was incapable of emotional support.
It took Andreas a few long days to find the strength for the trip to Polly’s gravesite, but when his mother sent him off to Saint Basil’s cemetery he was ready. Attending to his sister’s gravesite was an important duty that their family was obliged to carry out every day, and Martha insisted that he should go and light Polly’s lamp as soon as possible. Sometimes he would have to go alone, his mother said, and other times he would visit with Mariah, when she couldn’t make the trip herself.
When he arrived at the old suburban cemetery, just a short mile from home, he tended a few silver coins and bought white candles from a peddler at the front gate. Then he headed for the children’s ward at the far end of Saint Basil’s. He approached the dreary place that his mother had described vaguely and realized that he already knew about it from a previous visit. The chapel, where his teacher’s service was held, was right next to the section where small, unfortunate children were buried. If he only knew the year before that he would soon visit again for a different reason, he might have wondered about his own destiny, about the order of things in this world, and about the big scheme of things. But he didn’t know then; he wasn’t meant to know any of this.
Shuffling toward the ward, he didn’t take long at all to locate Polly’s freshly-dug grave. She was buried in the first row, right up front by the street, as if she was a guardian angel for that sacred piece of land, her grave lying across from the chapel’s west side. Many graves of children lay there, set in parallel order among the myriad rows, isolated in that far corner from the rest of the grounds. It was a peculiar cast-out in afterlife, a place that hid unpleasant memories of times long-gone, and a place that kept the dark secrets of adults who had failed their own children. So this is where they buried Polly?
He mumbled as if he doubted his sister was dead and buried right there, and he reluctantly shuffled toward her grave, and his stomach was tied in a knot when he stopped by the mound of soil. A wave of nausea from the nectar of decaying flowers, combined with the intensity of his feelings, washed over him and almost knocked him out. As expected, expression of tremendous grief was evident in the sheer quantity of flowers and burned candles that littered Polly’s gravesite. Andreas recalled the words of the priest at his teacher’s funeral: “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” So is that what my sister is becoming below that dirt?
Andreas understood grief now clearer than before, but the stark reality of Polly’s untimely passing had shattered his viewpoint about the invincibility of human beings. He had landed on his face once again, had smashed it to pieces and bled like the time when he fell and shattered his beautiful teeth on the corner of the iron bed during a balloon tossing with his father at age six. Having believed that man was intelligent, spiritual and emotional,and death was abstract rather than real,Andreas hardly grasped the reason why “perfect” human beings were removed early from a life full of promise. He didn’t think he’d ever understand the purpose in that.
He dutifully chased away a bee that circled around him, and the bee figured he wasn’t going to claim the flower nectar for him, and so it went back to its urgent task of pollinating a decaying gladiola. His gaze shifted to the head of the grave mound, where a temporary wooden cross, which soon would be replaced by a regular marble cross, was stuck in the ground, its inscription reading:
Polyteme “Polly” Zorbas
Aged 6
Andreas stared at the name on the cross and read it again and again. His sister’s surname that was his, too, was spelled out on that cross, telling of her passing onto the next world. But what world was that? And what would happen to her there? He recalled the old days, that weren’t so old, when he played and laughed with Polly around the house and in the park. Back then it seemed as if their lives were woven together. Then everything had changed so quickly, and so dramatically, and it would never be the same again.
He knelt on the ground and lit her oil lamp, and a white flame rose to life, filling him with hope. He decided to sit in the shade of the chapel. On the opposite side, across from the buried children, imposing mausoleums stretched along the path, separated between them by narrow alleys. The mausoleums were guarded by sturdy cypress trees whose woodsy scent was accented by burning incense. Andreas could swear the air was filled with the unmistakable smell of death.
Far and away, outside the graveyard stretched a huge dried field with only a patch of green oaks in its middle. The oasis held his gaze, and he let his mind rest; he needed the strength that comes from peace. Then he heard the cooing of a dove from the chapel’s gable roof, but the cooing soon stopped. He didn’t sense a change in the air until he thought he heard a soft, familiar voice.
“Andreas.”
He looked at Polly’s gravesite. His sister stood by her cross, her head a white explosion of light and heat, her frail body was clothed in a pale pink dress. He was startled, overcome by expectation and fear, and then he rose on his feet slowly, and he shaded his eyes with the back of his hand, trying to see clearly in the distance. As the time and space continuum seemed to have collapsed, the late afternoon sun appeared brighter than in high noon, and the few steps that separated him from Polly measured on a longer scale. His own tunnel vision and the divine aura around Polly had injected in the scene an essence of the supernatural. In his alertness, Andreas knew he wasn’t imagining things, but the sun behind Polly was too bright for him, and he couldn’t effectively discern her face. The next moment he wished to sprint ahead and meet his sister up close, but he only shuffled a couple of steps forward.
“Polly?”
“Hello, Andreas”
“How did you get back here?” he asked in awe.
“I am still here. I never left,” she said quietly.
“But everyone said you died”
“I don’t know. I heard the doctors talking, and then something pulled me through the wall of my hospital room. I couldn’t find my way back home,” she said.
“Polly, everyone at home is asking for you. They are crying,me, Petie, Mariah, Elena.”
“I know. I hear them all the time. But I don’t know what to do. I must go somewhere but don’t know where.”
Her words didn’t make sense.
” love you, little sister. I’ve been feeling terrible about all that happened,your fall; the hospital; all the bad things that we did to you…”
“My fall was an accident, Andreas. We were playing. We all were happy together; me, and you, and Mariah. You didn’t mean to push me and Mariah, I lost my balance. Remember now? It’s not your fault. it’s no one’s fault,” Polly cried out.
“I am so sorry, Polly. I am so sorry. I love you. Please forgive me!” he begged.
The indelible pictures of Polly’s accident flashed at neck-breaking speed on the screen of his mind: the blood streaming from her mouth, the instant swelling of her lips, his desperate efforts to stop her bleeding. If only he had not pushed Mariah on Polly during their merry-go-round on top of sharp-edged bricks; if Mariah hadn’t taken Polly down with her; if their parents had not taken four days to take Polly to the hospital, his sister would still be alive.
He wondered if he could defy the energy field between them and dash to her gravesite to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, to make sure that Polly was right there, and that he could touch her once again. The sun was blinding, and he covered his eyes from fear of going blind, but then the sunlight dimmed, and he managed to get himself together.
He run to his sister’s grave and checked the mound of soil and behind the wreaths, but there was no one there but him: the grave was undisturbed, the flame in the lamp kept burning, and the candles were reduced to flameless thumbnails of melted wax. He heard the same dove crying and looked in the direction of the church. A lone bird cooed from the place he had rested at before, and the dove flew to the roof of the church, cooed again, and flew away beyond the cypress trees in the opposite direction. He stepped out on the path to think clearly but needed to put more distance between him and the grave. He returned to Polly’s gravesite to say good-bye and hurried to the exit of the cemetery, turning to look back only once. Outside the gate, the same odd-looking peddler watched him with a hawkish stare. Andreas ran as if his life was going to be snatched away by an invisible force that he sensed was inhabiting that bizarre place,until his lungs were about to explode, until he had made it safely home.
Read more about PREDICTION and Johnathan Gikas HERE.
Copyright 2009 Johnathan Gikas. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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