An untruth

Katerina spun the steering wheel as far as she could to the left, terror plastered onto her face. Her view was completely covered with the front-facing view of the truck. Time seemed to move in slow motion as the front of the truck impacted her side of the car, sending a horrible vibration throughout the car and flinging Katerina’s unconscious body into an unnatural position in her seat. The driver of the truck swore and opened his door, only to stumble and fall from the driver’s seat onto the pavement. Two unconscious bodies left to die in the middle of the night.

1

She woke, her vision blurry and her breathing painful. Nothing came in to focus for a long time and she forced herself to stay awake and adjust her eyes. The exposure to air pained her dry eyes and she couldn’t hold them open for much longer. A tear dripped onto her cheek. She fell back into unconsciousness with the tear still we on her face.

She woke again, her vision instantly more defined and relieved to see her surroundings. She sat alone in a hospital room, the light from outside drifting lazily through the clear windows and lighting up the bottom of her bed. She was covered in white sheets with blue strokes across them in an almost abstract fashion, unnatural for a hospital.

Instantly, her lips felt dry and she licked them. She felt her tongue roll over the crevasses in her lips and winced at the sting of moisture.

Moments passed, just her alone in the hospital room, her body covered in a sheet. She made no attempt to move, or think, or do anything apart from stare at her surroundings, totally absent of any emotion. After the awe of consciousness wore off, she became bored with the dull colours surrounding her and worried that no one was coming in to check on her. She tried to recollect if there was anyone who would care about her being in a hospital or anyone who would care about her in general. Her thoughts began to cluster in her mind, anxiety turning to fear of this new setting. How was she even to know she was in a hospital. How did she even get here?

The absence of knowledge worried her, her eyes grew large and sweat dripped from her forehead. The liquid fell in her mouth and she tasted nothing but the faint sense of salt and the overwhelming emotion of fear. She didn’t want to lie, alone in this bed anymore.

She commanded her mind to move her limbs. The blanket that covered her didn’t move. Again, she attempted to force her left arm to reveal itself from under the blanket and free her from this prison. Nothing happened. Panic overcame her. She turned side to side, frantically looking for any explanation behind anything. Her brain was empty, she had no recollection of anything and all she wanted to do is leave this place. The window outside gazed upon a city she didn’t remember, a vast concrete playing field that she desperately wanted to be a part of. She couldn’t comprehend how scared she was, nothing made any sense and she wanted to become nothing and cease existing. The light from the window glared into her eyes and the white from the bedsheets was too while. She desperately attempted to pull her left arm up but with no prevail. She kicked her feet around and the bedsheet remained totally still. Her right arm was her only hope. With a face as if she was being tortured, she freed her arm from the blanket. She sighed in relief and pulled the blanket off her body.

Underneath the blanket lay a naked body with nothing but a right arm. Unable to comprehend the sheer insanity of the situation she was in, she passed out, with a face of terror.

-         6 Months Later

2

Katerina’s eyes peeled open and she pulled the doona off her bed and flung it to one side. Birds outside chirped and squealed at the sun, rising over the hills. She rolled over to look out the window. The trees tapped the glass pane and she felt a sudden rush of fear. She didn’t know where she was.

Her limbless body rolled helplessly across the bedsheet and she wailed. Nothing seemed remotely familiar to her and she felt utterly helpless in this new world. The trees against the window didn’t seem real, didn’t look real. Nothing about them indicated that they were trees apart from their basic physical structure. Nothing about the bed she lay on was a bed. She had no reason to believe anything was anything and if that was the case then how could she believe that. Where was she and what should she believe.

She rolled off the bed and landed with a thump on the ground. Nothing seemed to resonate with her. She was trapped in the endless plane of emotions inside her brain and her mind pounded inside her head. She was only herself and the only thing she knew was herself and nothing else could ever exist. She rolled and screamed on the ground. Pain flooded her blood and created a demon inside her, controlling what she felt and what she did. Her mind was controlled by something else and nothing she saw made any sense to her. She felt so lost and so alone in this strange room littered with objects that had no meaning and made from a material that didn’t exist. She screamed to be let out. She wanted to be freed.

She couldn’t be freed from herself, however. She was stuck. She was stuck to see everything as to how it could be not how it was. She was stuck to forget the past and imagine the future. She was stuck to live only ever how she lived and she was stuck to never be able to comprehend the place she was stuck inside.

Katerina suffered trauma to the brain in a truck accident many years ago but she was reborn. What lay curled on the ground was not Katerina, but someone else. Someone who thought differently reacted differently than everyone else. She saw the world in such a unique sense that impossible to understand. And as she lay on the ground, she had an uncontrollable sense of clarity. She felt a beam of energy shoot through her, a feeling of pure power, pure knowledge. She knew what no one would ever know. She knew something so important and so key to being alive that to live without it wouldn’t be living, instead, it would be inhabiting an entity and lying dormant until the entity passed on.

It was something necessary to convey but physically impossible to understand without the epiphany she had had.

But did she know anything?

3

‘It’s nothing it’s just a car.’

‘Just a car Ted? Tell that to my wife! God, bloody, just a car.’

‘You know what Ryan, next time I have a party, you’re not getting invited.’

Ted spun Ryan’s chair around and Ryan looked at Ted in annoyance as he swivelled.

‘I’d hate to think that I’d miss out on cocaine and shitty beer,’ Ryan said, slowly coming to a halt.

‘I feel like you’re not being totally honest with me-‘

‘You idiot Ted! I was being sarcastic!’

‘I’m sorry I don’t understand sarcastic Ryan,’ Ted droned, his face turning long as he said Ryan’s name.

‘You didn’t say it right.’

‘Sarcastic?’

‘You say sarcasm.’

‘But you just said sarcastic!’

‘They’re two different words you numbskull!’

‘Then why would I say two different words? Why wouldn’t I just say one word!’

Ted straightened his navy tie to indicate his apparent maturity. As he did so, a blue light flashed on the panel in front of the two. They sat on swivel chairs surrounded by words and lights in a small grey-blue room, facing a glass window which looked into a forest from a high view.

‘You have to go,’ Ryan said.

‘No! I’ve got plenty of paperwork to do!’

‘Bullshit you have paperwork, I work with you all day and you have literally never done paperwork.’

‘No that’s not true, you must be distracted when I do it.’

‘Distracted with what?’ Ryan stood up, presumably to deal with whatever the blue light was indicating, ‘looking into the forest? Reading the names of the patients?’

‘I’ll come with,’ Ted said, temporarily pausing their discussion. They walked out of the room and began walking down a hallway, with thick iron doors on either side of them. The hallway extended beyond belief and in front of each door, there was a small piece of paper with a name and an ‘illness’.

‘The forest is pretty distracting,’ Ted continues.

‘Nothing ever happens, that’s exactly why they built this bloody place here because it’s the one place where nothing happens.’

‘That isn’t true, the other day I saw a bear!’

‘I was there you idiot, that wasn’t a bear it was just a tree stump.’

‘Oh, I thought it was a bush.’

They turned a corner and began occasionally glancing at the names.

‘Bush or tree stump, it wasn’t a bear,’ Ryan said, inspecting ‘Oakley Leigh’ on a piece of paper. His illness stated ‘belief in other life’.

‘I’m sure there are bears though.’

‘Yes Ted, I’m sure the bears love to all cuddle up near a mountain with a building built into the side.’

‘That isn’t what I meant.’

‘I know I was making a joke.’

‘Wow, comedian of the year! Since when was sarcastic a joke?’

‘You said it wrong again!’

‘Shut up, it’s a new word,’ Ted stopped walking and inspects a piece of paper, ‘here’.

The paper read Katerina Heilik. The illness stated, ‘belief in the untrue’.

Ted scoffed as he read it, ‘belief in the untrue, surely that isn’t actually a thing.’

Ryan laughed, ‘yeah they’re one of those sidewalk protestors I bet, ‘Save the reefs!’ or whatever’

Ted continued the joke, his hand resting on the handle of the door, ‘it’s like the-ah-umm, the cake from that video game, what was it?’

‘Give me a hint.’

‘With the portals…’

‘Portal? Oh yes, haha! The cake is a lie!’ Ryan put on a robotic voice in reference to the video game.

‘The cake is a lie!’ Ted responded. He turned to look at the door and turns the handle. As he pulled the door open, screaming comes from inside the room. Katerina lay on the floor. She yells jibberish.

‘Nothing we do matters!’ she yelled, her eyes wide and horrifying, desperate to get a point across.

Ted cautiously stepped around the edge of the room and Ryan stood in the doorway, looking inquisitively at Katerina. Katerina locks eyes with Ryan and screams nonsense.

‘We create for creation! The presence of life only gives us nothing to live for!’ Katerina screamed, rolling helplessly limbless on the soft floor. She was moving into her senior years and her hair was greying.

‘The cake is a lie,’ Ryan muttered from the doorway.

Ted picked up a syringe from the roof, inaccessible to Katerina. He walked over to her and plunged it into her shoulder as she was in mid-sentence. She instantly fell to the ground.

‘Help me get her on the bed,’ he said.

‘What the hell was she screaming out?’ Ryan said.

‘Who knows, who the fuck cares,’ Ted said, pulling her body from the floor.

‘The cake is a lie.’

Ted scoffs, ‘Yeah, the cake is a lie.’