Waiting
The night finally settles, the blanket of darkness smothering the sun and wrapping the houses in sleep. All except number 4. The one with the blue front door and the dinosaur patterned curtains in the upstairs window. Tonight, those curtains stay open, and the light stays on, a desperate call for help to an ambulance that is too far away.
A mother holds her son in her arms as she paces back and forth over the carpet, rhythmically soothing his sweat-slicked hair as he curls his tiny, blotchy fingers around the frayed edge of her cardigan. She counts his breaths, counts the beats of his heart, counts the minutes until help arrives. He barely makes a sound. The giggles and incoherent baby babble are only memories; his beautiful smile only seen in pictures. The boy she cradles in her arms is slipping like sand through her fingers.
She presses her lips to his burning forehead, willing the power of her love to banish the red that marks his skin like hundreds of tracking points from sniper rifles. She silently pleads that the guillotine of fate stops before it’s too late, that her love can keep the air in her son’s lungs. She says that she will give anything to save him but time is not listening; a jury convinced she is guilty before she even opens her mouth.
She sinks into a chair, limbs leaden with exhaustion. The bruises under her bloodshot eyes blossom like weeds in an abandoned garden. Time is ticking onward, stealing each shallow breath from his lungs. The night is never-ending, the sun is never rising, and the sound of salvation is too far away. It’s all her fault. Her scepticism had twisted the facts into rose-tinted lies: 'he’s fine'; 'out of all the little boys and girls in the world, death wouldn’t choose mine'. And no matter how bad it became, how silences were no longer peaceful but worrying, how symptoms kept on persisting, she just kept on smiling and repeating ‘he’s fine’.
He’s not fine. But the truth came too late. Soon his warm body will be a cold corpse in her arms. The ghost of his laugh and the patter of his tiny feet would haunt her. She’d turn around, expecting to see him, his toy dinosaur in his chubby hands and food staining a mouth that would stretch into the brightest smile, only to see nothing at all. He is her light, her little angel with a halo of curiosity and wings of mischief. But the night threatens to snatch him away and leave her all alone in the dark.
The night has settled over every house but number 4, the one with the dinosaur patterned curtains, leaving the mother sat in despair, holding her son in her arms, his head pressed to her heart. And when the sirens finally pierce the silence, she knows it's too late.
