Ashes of Hope by Lydia Sherrer

Author:Lydia Sherrer [Sherrer, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-950267-99-6
Publisher: Chenoweth Press

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For a while, I swim in and out of consciousness. I dimly sense my master lift me, and I hear a car door open and close. Then vibrations and a slow swaying lull me into oblivion.

When I wake, the vibrations have stopped. My whole body aches and my shoulder is on fire. I can’t move without pain shooting through every nerve on that side of my body. It’s hard to breathe, and I feel too weak to sit up, so I lie still and listen.

Someone moves nearby and a hand slips under my neck to gently lift my head. I taste the tang of metal as a cup is pressed to my lips, and I try to drink. The cool water is a sweet relief, but some of it goes down wrong and I cough reflexively, opening my eyes to see a startled look on my master’s now smooth and unmarked face. He hurries to prop me up, but the coughing hurts so much I almost black out. When the fit finally subsides, I taste blood in my mouth.

He tries to feed me some deliciously hot soup, but I struggle to swallow and more often than not start coughing again. Finally, I give up and go limp, hoping I’ll pass out again so the pain will stop.

I do lose consciousness, eventually. Time blurs, and life becomes a cycle of vague waking and fitful sleeping. My master tries to make me eat and drink, but I can never keep much down. The pain which greets me upon waking is so bad that I start to wish I won’t wake up again. At times, I’m lucid enough to be grateful that my suffering is nothing compared to the horrors I so narrowly escaped. But that knowledge does nothing to strengthen my body or bolster my will to survive. I am just weary. So weary.

Time passes. I’m moved sometimes, but I rarely bother opening my eyes. My body has started to burn with fever, and I shiver constantly despite the mountain of blankets my master keeps wrapped around me. My constant coughing takes every ounce of strength I have, and it leaves my throat raw and swollen.

At one point I feel cool skin pressed to my lips instead of cold metal, and I taste salty blood. In a daze, I wonder why he’s trying to feed me blood. Have we run out of canned food? But I’m too tired, in too much pain, and too delirious with fever to care. I cough most of it up like I do everything else I try to drink.

Between fevered nightmares, my incoherent mind tries to puzzle out why my master risked so much to rescue me, and why he continues to nurse me. It would be so much easier to move on and find someone else to serve as his next “donor.” The question comes to me easily, but the answer is out of my reach.

A while later—I don’t know how long—I wake to the sound of tinny music.

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