Under Limited Daylight

Daylight is a blessing.

Daylight is warm. Daylight is life, an opening image that expects forward motion. Daylight is love in pain that goes unchecked.

As much as she hates to wake up early, Shelby watches every sunrise. It’s a biological impediment she developed during elementary school because the burnt yellow school bus would always pass her house right on schedule at 6:25 in the morning. Once upon a time, she would raise her fist to the pink sky, half asleep, and mumble how the coming day will rue, well, itself, but those days were over. She knows now that life is what it is and for very few, life is the perfect experience of overwhelming highs and bearable lows. But Shelby isn’t looking for perfect perfection; never has been. 

With the battlefield her family home had become when her little brother was born, her expectations of most things are next to nothing. Perfection is overrated when “normal and depressing” or “totally awkward random” exist. Both situations, in which, are justified by their respective events’ possible utilization as writing material—from a simple theme to a unique phrase, it all gets locked in the brain vault—like her English teachers for the last few years have urged her to capitalize on. 

“You could be one of the greats,” each one always tells her but, like with perfection, greatness is not her mind. Although, that is advice still going ignored as, these days, she’s run out anything to say.

Anyway, no, she’s not seeking perfection, just solace, and she has found it in the form of Michelle, a walking mitochondrion. (God, that’s sounds dumb even in her head, but the only takeaway her generation has taken from their sixth-grade biology class and applied to all other sciences thereafter is that damn “powerhouse of the cell” trivia.)

However, that solace will be leaving soon and that… brings up… a feeling.

“Shell,” Michelle’s throat scratches out. The white sheets of the hospital bed she lays back into wrinkles beneath her spindly fingers. They used to be at least, the scars and callouses from gymnastics are still there even after months of inactivity. “What’s your problem?”

 It isn’t even posed as a question. Shelby smiles. “You see right through me.”

Michelle scoffs, eyes rolling so far back as if to call her comment was rudimentary, which is true. No argument there. These girls may have only met two years ago as freshmen, but their bond has proven breakneck and unbendable. “You’re wearing the same face when you’re reading one of those heavy books you rent from the library, you know with all the different stories that somehow connect all the way back to each other?” 

Michelle’s face contorts. As transparent as Shelby is, the same can be said for her.

“Anthology.”

“Yeah, that’s the word,” her exclamation ends with an abrupt, wet cough. Even as her lungs fail, Michelle chooses to take pleasures in the smallest victories but there’s…

Shelby doesn’t recoil, just curls the sleeve of her sweater over her fist and wipes the blood from the corner of her best friend’s mouth without a word. She doesn’t look at the sticky residue, doesn’t heave a beleaguered sigh, just sits back in her seat at the bedside and looks out the window to the setting sun as said best friend’s eyes flutter close for an unsolicited nap.

Wesley, Michelle’s older cousin, an unnaturally charming grad student of twenty-six, yawns awake out of his slumber from the leather couch against the white wall opposite the bed. “You feelin’ okay, Shell?”

Shelby, for the third time the whole day, shifts her gaze away from Michelle. Wesley looks disheveled to say the least; intense bedhead, dried drool stains, cheek indentation from the leather, and a ratty t-shirt with the chewed-up collar but it works for him. Yeah, he’s a handsome mess and it would tick Shelby off because absolutely nothing about her works that way, but she knows that under the oxymoronic debonair unkemptness is a black cloud of nausea and guilt. Instead of addressing that cloud, she answers his question with a question.

“Shouldn’t you be asking the patient drifting in and out consciousness that?” He merely looks at her, expectant, and she concedes, “It’s times like this that I would have used August as an easy getaway excuse. ‘Yeah, I gotta head out lest my brother dies from starvation when his stomach makes literal noises of death because he can’t put his damn console down.’” The weak laugh dies on her lips. 

“How does the little guy feel about being your scapegoat?” 

Shelby sits back in her hospital chair, rubbing at her temples. She sighs, “Doesn’t care. Again, he’s too glued to his 8-bit, fictional world to be concerned about anything in this one.”

“He’s not here tonight.” Wes plays with his fingers in that childlike way he does when he wants to attempt to be subtle however knows that he’s failed stupendously. 

Shelby finds it adorable. That being said, she remains stoic. “Not like he’d pay attention.”

“Well, I don’t think he’d go so far as to ignore it, if that’s what you mean. You can’t ignore something like this.” Wesley falters to peer at Mitch, who’s conked out for the time being. His decision to carry on or not is a whole stage play happening behind his face. When he recovers, his volume is lower but sturdier as well. “It’s an impossible task. You can say you don’t see it all you want but it’s right there in front you. And for any senses you lack, the other ones will gladly make up for it. Life wants to hurt you as much as it can so it will.”

“Wes,” Shelby bites out. He can get as quiet as he wants but with the object of their conversation right in the middle of them, she can’t imagine it makes much of a difference.

They stare into each other’s eyes. One pair pleading and the other pair baiting a challenge. Guess who’s who.

“Hey, Mitch!” He snaps his fingers at his younger cousin, rousing her once again. It’s a bit more shocking than intended when she jerks and pulls at the IV strapped to her bony arm. It used to be so saturated with both sinew and color. Not anymore.

Emitting a noise next to that of a growl, Shelby smacks his hand. “Don’t startle her so fast. You’ll disrupt her equilibrium.”

Mitch blows a lock of hair out of her face, voice hoarser than before. From a lack of air of excess of faulty lung activity, pick your poison. Doesn’t really matter cause it’s all semantics; either option is dangerous and not stopping any time soon. “What do you want? If you’re going to gossip, get quiet or leave the room.”

“Sorry,” Wes and Shelby provide, simultaneous.

The charismatic grad student continues to make very small talk with his cousin, occasionally glancing at his black wristwatch every so often, while the quiet high schooler studies the outside world. In the last thirty-nine hours she’s spent burrowed in this box of unknown fates, the process of derealization is real and very much disturbing, albeit a comfortable disturbing. Disregarding the actual time of day, 7:41 PM, Shelby has come to believe that the sky has lost its blueness. The clouds have lost their puffiness and float by in long streaks masking the sun’s already reduced glow. Life is less alive in this room, yet still, of course, none of the three will ever admit it aloud.

It’s not denial. It’s not. It’s a calm brought by the obvious that there’s no room to deny anything so why say anything? Things are the way they are and cannot be changed, so why say anything… Why say anything when you can’t change it?

Shelby embodies level-headedness, learned just how necessary this skill could be when she was young and mediating her parents’ constant warring. A mere fourth grader who likes to read middle-school level books out of boredom and already well-versed in the death of one’s love and the neurons that hide behind it. So, yes, the paragon of equanimity, both of the body and spirit, she is! Which is exactly why the sight of the curly-haired nurse (Shelby remembers her name Angela) rolling in the two-tier cart, displaying Mitch’s dose and a syringe to deliver that dose right out in the open, on the top tray, for all proximate to get a limitless gawking at, does nothing to shatter that now expert level skill.

Apparently, her right hand’s got such a vicelike grip on Mitch’s bedsheets that Wesley has to grab it. Not in the mood to be coddled, she starts to pull away but stops. 

Hold on and assess, she ruminates.

Stoic. Breathe in.

Stable. Wait eight seconds.

Unwavering in the storm of uncomfortable feelings. Breathe out.

Even in front of the cousins who know her better than anyone else, even her own witch of a mother, angel of a brother, and charlatan of a father, she is stoic, stable, and unwavering. The thing to be understood about her, above all else, is that she is selfish. She does nothing for no one if it requires too much effort. By no means, has the calm ever been for them, those on the outside looking in—she’d scream bloody murder if her body would let her. No, it’s for her because if she did scream bloody murder, she’d never stop. Thus, to avoid any more temptation, she stays watching the world pass behind the large sheet of glass in front of her.

The sight of the nurse dragging the syringe head of whatever it’s called up to pull medicine into the tube goes unseen. The click of nail bed meeting the glass to dispel any bubbles goes unheard. The density between the uncharacteristically solemn cousins, mutually of which, on a good day, one can manage to keep quiet for a whopping ten seconds, goes unquestioned. 

Although, a stimulus hits the roof of her mouth, her tongue meticulously investigating. She would downplay it but for every second it exists, it grows harsher. She recognizes it as doom.

It’s the dry, embittered taste of untouchable sun. Of limited daylight. And in its burnt glow, rage leaks from Shelby’s every pore and forced to drift off with a gust of air out the window and she does not look back.

The room is silent.

A fragile hand finds her left fist. Soft as a moonbeam. It trembles, tickled by the cool evening breeze.

A delicate Hello, Moon escapes from the direction of the hand where the sheets are still white, and so are the walls. White as the moon. 

Shelby focuses on the massive rock in the sky, bursting up from the horizon. Soon, it will perch high on its throne over her head, graciously bookending a full 18 hours of her clandestine suffering only to leave again so the light reemerges from its dank cave like a gluttonous bear to make her relive her lies over again. It’s cruel.

Moonlight is a curse.

Moonlight is icy. Moonlight is death, a conclusion to a long journey. Moonlight is a placid grip on the throat that never relents.

“Hello Moon,” Shelby mimics.

 …and into the vault it goes.