https://penastory.com/2016/11/03/haunting-shadows-episode-2-rooky-kamiz/

Excerpt from episode one:

And then like a bomb waiting to explode, he pounced on me and dealt a heavy slap on my ear that rang into my medulla and recalled childhood memories of when I first felt true pain. And at that moment, his ever faithful alibi PHCN interrupted the power supply and in darkness all I could make sense of was his fist cutting through thin air and my voice resonating the pain that tortured my senses and in no time the world turned blurry and faint as I lost grip of consciousness.

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The little girl swirled around in her frilly pink tutu. The sun was out, the swing moving slowly but nobody was on it. The playground was empty except for the little girl who had stopped spinning around. She was looking straight at me now and muttering something inaudible.

I focus on her lips, trying to figure out what she was saying, but it got fainter until I couldn’t hear her voice anymore although her lips were still moving.

She points towards something in my hands and I look down to see a neatly wrapped baby. I look back up to see the kid fading into the background. Everything was fading into the background.

The kid was crying now and still pointing at the baby. The swing was in full motion. The baby on my arms starts wailing really loud. There was chaos everywhere.

The swing starts creaking and the baby’s cries become almost unbearable, I start screaming….

****************************************

I open my eyes to a very insanely bright light. The full blast of the bulb hits my eyes and makes me cringe in agony. I raise my hands to shade my sensitive eyes from the burning pain and I notice the drip attached to my hand.

I squint my eyes to look closely at my hand and then the stand that held the drip. I wasn’t registering anything but the insane pain behind my eyes. I move my head a little to look around the unfamiliar room I was in and immediately felt the sharpest pain in my head.

“Ah,” I mutter as I lift my free hand to my head.

I feel something that feels like a cloth wrapped around my forehead. I keep on touching it until I realised it was a bandage. A bandage around my head? Why? I obviously was in a hospital, but I had no idea what I was doing on a bed with my head in a bandage. There has to be some explanation. I try to sit up on my bed and immediately plop back on it. The pain that pierced through every part of my body that moved was too real and too raw. Maybe I had been in an accident. But I couldn’t remember anything. I touch my head again and strangely finding comfort in the feel of the bandage.

I resigned to laying back on the bed with my eyes trained on the ceiling. I keep trying to remember what had happened to bring me into the hospital. It had to have been an accident. I mean, what else could it possibly be? With my mind still on this, I fall asleep.

I wake up seemingly hours later to a nurse injecting something into the bag of drip connected to my arm. Another nurse had my arms wrapped in a blood pressure checking instrument. The pressure on the instrument increases, tightening around my part of my arm that was encased in it. I notice a thermometer lodged in my underarm. The nurse injecting fluids into the drip turns around, and our eyes meet. She looked shocked, but quickly recovered and gave me a really beautiful smile. She was a really beautiful lady, with a shape that would turn heads. Not too curvy but even in the shapeless nurse’ uniform, there was no denying that she had a killer body.

“Agatha, the patient is awake,” she said, obviously talking to the other nurse who was scribbling something on a pad-like object. I turn to see the addressed nurse look up at me in surprise, then shock, then something resembling incredulity, like this was an unexpected turn of events. This reaction made me very uncomfortable. Obviously, I had not been expected to be conscious, at least not right now. Was there something wrong with me? Was I supposed to be dead?

“I’d get the doctor right away. Help me take her temperature and finish up here for me.” Nurse Agatha said, dropping her pad on d bed and hastily making her way to the door. The killer-body nurse slowly makes her way to my bed, her eyes appraising my body as if looking for malicious signs, something out of place, something bad. I squirm mentally at the attention this nurse was giving me.

I try to move my head again and once more I am accosted by the blinding pain behind my eyes. I cringe visibly.

“Take it easy. Don’t try to move around too much, your body is still repairing.” She reaches under my arm to remove the thermometer and checks it for my temperature and writes down the information gotten on the pad left behind. She unwraps the BP instrument from my arms and carefully takes it off, taking care not to move my hand around too much.

“How do you feel?” she asks, placing my hands back on the bed

“I feel like a train ran over my body. Like an elephant is sitting on my head. Like I fell off a skyscraper. Like my body was forcibly thrown from an airplane into the sea. Like I fell off a mountain top and had my body firmly acquainted with all the ragged edges from top to bottom. I think that is about it.” I answer, running out of comparisons for how I feel.

“You are a funny one, aren’t you?” she gives me another one of her stunning smiles and I am once again reminded of how gorgeous she was. And she had dimples too.

“I am just saying it as it is. I can barely turn my head without feeling like a knife has been plunged into my skull. And when I tried sitting up, my body screamed for help.”

“Are you a writer?” she folds up the equipment, places it on the bed, then walks over to the head of the bed.

“I think so. I write books and scripts,” I watch her walk over to me. She walked like she was unsure of where she was going.

“That’s great. I like to think that I would have been a writer too if I had the chance. Raise your head a little, please.”

“Then why aren’t you a writer?” I cringe as I lift my head, but I try not to shout. She lifts my pillow into an upright position, then presses something on the bed. The bed starts moving up, adjusting until I was in an almost sitting position.

I rest my head back on the pillow, feeling more relaxed.

“This is so much better, thanks. So why aren’t you a writer yet?”

“Well, my father had his mind set on me becoming a doctor or a nurse. I didn’t make it into medical school, so here I am.”

“That doesn’t stop you from being a writer.” I adjust the pillow until it felt just right.

“Between working my shifts and taking care of my sick mother, I do not have a lot of free time.”

“I am sorry. What about your father, and siblings?”

“Father’s dead and I am an only child. My birth was really stressful for my mom and complications during the labour damaged her womb.”

“I am sorry.”

“You don’t have to be. Plus I do not have the training to be a writer.” she takes down my blanket to my waist, and tucks it in.

“Do you read books?” I felt an itch just behind my ears. I lift my hands to scratch it, and put it right back down. “I have an itch behind my ears but my hands hurt when I lift them up”

“Let me take care of that for you.” she reaches behind my right ear and scratches around until she hit the right spot. My sigh of content lets her know that she had the right place.

“That’s much better, thanks”

“It’s my duty. And yes I do read books but what has that got to do with writing?”

“A lot. Sometimes, that is all the training you need. And an over-active imagination.”

“What was your discipline in the university?”

“Business Administration,” I smile at her. It didn’t hurt so much. She smiles back and is about to say something else when someone I assume to be the doctor walks in with Nurse Agatha. She immediately closes her mouth and picks up the pile on the bed.

“The doctor is here.”

“She can see that,” my assumed doctor replies in a curt tone. I could sense the tension between both of them. There was history here, albeit a tumultuous one.

“I am sorry,” and to me she said, “please excuse me, I have other patients to see. I’d come check on you later.” She pats my hands and starts to make her way to the door.

“I never asked for your name” I say as she nears the door.

“I am Sharon.”

“I am….” I am cut off by the doctor who tells her to get back to work so he could attend to his patients. I already hated him. Why would anybody be hostile to such a likable person. I decide then that I was on Team Sharon even though this doctor had my life in his hands.

“She was just doing her job,” I retort to the doctor after Nurse Sharon left.

“I know, but I need to do mine too and she was obstructing that,” he moved towards me and accepts the pad that Nurse Sharon had left behind from Nurse Agatha.

“I didn’t think so.”

“Well, I did,” was the cold response I got. I decided that I really hated this man.

“So how are you feeling?” he asks looking over the information scribbled on the pad.

“I already told the other nurse. You should ask her.” I retort with as much venom as I could muster.

“Please ma, don’t make my job any harder. I just want to know how you feel generally.”

I resign my defiance and explain to him in plain terms that I was in pains all over.

“Well, that is expected, you were badly bruised when you were brought in. You have been in a comma for two weeks.”

He hands the pad back to the nurse, draws closer and checks my hands for something.

“Two weeks? What happened?” I respond in disbelief.

“We would find out soon enough. I am going to ask you a series of routine questions now. This is just protocol to determine how much the wound to your head might have affected you because you were badly bashed in the head and we noticed some trauma on the cranium which we think could have affected the brain.”

Well, that explains the bandage. But brain damage? I feel fine regarding… I nod.

“Okay. First question, this is just standard routine. What is your name?”

Really? That is the question to determine if I had brain damage or not? I chuckle at the ridiculousness of the question. Well, I’d tell him my name. Its….

Wait, my name is….

I slowly turn my head towards the doctor and then the nurse. Fear pervaded every pore in my body.

My name is…

“I don’t remember.”

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yes yes pls continue