Four Painful Years

> Get the hot guy nurse's number. Keep the victory momentum going! Also try asking him how your situation is and when you can get out.

No problem! Before the nurse leaves with your empty plate, you lay the smooth moves on him. You vaguely liken his good looks to the sweetness of the pudding he brought you, which causes him to chuckle. The gate has been opened. With that, you go in for the kill and ask him for his number.

… Oh. He’s been with his husband for three years, and their daughter is just starting kindergarten. That’s adorable. Oh well, at least he said he was flattered! He hands you two tablets of name brand painkiller. You ask for him to activate the cable on your TV. He complies, urges you to call again if you need anything, then leaves.

You attempt to smother yourself with your spare pillow because you are such an idiot. Why did you do that!? People don’t come to work to get hit on by terminally ill girls with pudding breath, Julie, they come to work to WORK. Ugh!

Read the mood, you thirsty, THIRSTY mess of a woman!

Anyway, hospital rooms like this usually have those tiny TVs. Flick it on and see if anything decent is on or if you made the news.

You get over your embarrassment eventually and turn on the little swingy-arm TV that sticks out of the wall. They must’ve put you on stupid amounts of morphine or something… All this movement isn’t hurting you as much as you thought it would.

You flip through the channels until you hit the news.

NEWSCASTER: “-osvenor Storage & Warehouse, where part-time employee Julie B. Mitchells - age 21 - experienced a catastrophic mental breakdown, attempting to murder her coworkers before taking her own life.”

You choke.

JULIE: “WHAT!?”


NEWSCASTER: “Thirteen years ago young Julie was diagnosed with a tumorous growth that comprised one-seventh of the mass in her brain. Doctors estimated that by her late teens, the growth would increase to around three times its size, causing Julie unbearable pain and irreperable damage to her mental health. Under these conditions, Julie would have only lived to the age of twenty-five before succumbing to her illness.”

Oh thanks, Channel 4 News. Thanks for showing you all those sad old pictures of Dad and baby you. Thanks for only bothering to follow up once you heard that poor little Julie died. Thanks for misreporting your death on national television while you still have living family members LIKE ARE YOU FOR REAL RIGHT NOW?

NEWSCASTER: “Fast-forward to today, where the damage to Julie’s brain has finally taken its toll. In the hours before her breakdown, Coworkers describe erratic behavior, mood swings, emotional outbursts and contemplations of suicide.”

… Huh? But… But none of that is true. The guys would never say that kind of stuff, where are they getting all this bogus information?

LUCA: “She’d been dealing with it for so long, it was only a matter of time. With the way she was acting, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”

…

MAXWELL: “She stopped taking her medication, I… I should’ve done something, but she insisted, know what I mean? I couldn’t just force her to take them, could I?”

TRENT: “Next thing we know, here she comes around the corner in the forklift just GUNNING it, right? She was headed straight for us, I couldn’t believe it… We got out of the way, she didn’t even slow down and… Boom, that was it.”

MUSTAFA: “...”
MUSTAFA: “I’m so sorry, Julie...”

… Wow. You… You are totally stunned. They lied about everything. They didn’t say anything about your neighbor, they made it sound like you were going crazy and… tried to kill them? How could they…?

You slump into your pillows, utterly betrayed. Your heart aches as you watch the rest of the news footage. They show a shot of the forks stuck in the concrete, but there’s no body pinned to it, not even a drop of blood or… whatever that man was made of. To the outside world it really looks like you just crashed the forklift into a wall for absolutely no reason... Like you’d gone insane.

Is that it? Was everything just a figment of your imagination, the fins, the birds, your neighbor? That must be it. You’ve finally lost whatever sanity you had left, and now you’re in the hospital in a coma after almost killing your friends. Or, maybe you did kill them, you’re just remembering them in your final moments. That explains why your injuries don't hurt... Nothing’s real anymore.

They said this would happen… You just thought you had more time.

You cry again, but this time you really feel like you deserve it. Your life’s been ruined time after time by your stupid malfunctioning brain, you’ll go out with a whimper if you damn well want to. It doesn’t matter now, but you try to dry your face with the bedsheets.

In doing so, your vision becomes clearer… and you see someone standing at the foot of your bed. Draped in alabaster, their arms are tucked behind their back, and a faint light shines in a halo around their head.

JULIE: “Sniff… Are… Are you… God?”























The figure hangs their head, disappointed.

???: “Oh sweet mercy, not another one...”

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Achievement Unlocked: "Hard Landing" - Learned the truth the hard way. (50In)