The Accident
By: MeLissa Charity Wilson

When Daniella found herself in the hospital she knew that she must have been working herself way too hard because she didn't know how she had gotton there. She yawned and started to drift back to sleep when she heard the doctors voice. "I'm here to talk about the results of your tests" his matter of fact tone beckoned. Daniella thought about how much she needed a vacation, ignoring the doctor whose voice irritated her growing headache beyond measure.

Just as sleep began to drown out the doctors continuous rattle, his spittle sprinkled ever so cooly against her forehead. "Get your nasty mouth away from my head", Daniella demanded through clenched teeth. She opened one eye and pushed his lowered body away from where he had bended down to get her attention. While he was indeed a doctor and she was in fact within his care, he was still on a pay roll, she thought to herself, and she would get some rest and recouperation or be transported to another hospital, better yet leave the premises altogether. She had a bad feeling about this man standing over her, something that she couldn't understand, something ominous.

He was still talking, "Your parents are here to see you, Daniella" he drawled out. Daniella made a sarcastic face at the doctor. "My parents are deceased" she snapped. "I don't want any visitors. Would you like my insurance card or am I well enough to be discharged yet?" She really preferred not to have any visitors, only to notify her boss on where she was. "Well it's not quite so simple, as I was saying..." the doctors voice began to trail off in her mind once more. He was drowned out by the thoughts that were raging inside her mind, thoughts that had nothing to do with her present situations, but other worries that she needed to take care of.

She heard a shuffle at the door of her room. She wondered exactly what type of medication they had given her in her IV because she saw two people who strongly resembled her parents, who had died two years before. She blinked as the doctor turned and pushed them back toward the echoing halls. She sqinted her eyes. "Who were they?" she inquired. "I assume that they weren't your parents", chided a nurse who picked up her tray of food and walked past the doctor and out of the room. She hadn't seen the nurse enter at all. Daniella began to feel more awake, more wired and a little confused.

Daniella stared up at the doctor, who had a suspicious look in his eye and a smile that was wicked enough to have been inspired by a trip to Hades. A long time seemed to tick by before she asked in a low mumble, "You were saying?" "Continue? Alright. Let me get to the core of what I was telling you" the doctor said, saliva visibly began to collect and well up in the corners of his mouth. "The issues we suffer through are tests that I personally feel we suffer through based on flaws in our genes. The tests help to strengthen and build us up, if we pass them" he went on, the base sound of his speech sounding deeper and deeper it seemed. "We can't be built up pschologically however, if we fail the tests that fate gives us. I'm here to tell you that you have failed your tests, Daniella."

An eerie feeling began to overcome Daniella. At first the doctor had only seemed rude and aggravating, but now he seemed to mask a deeper evil within himself, an evil that made her flesh crwl. Unconsciously, she scratched at her arm and then her leg. The doctors eyes began to dance in his sockets and he began to become enlarged, his entire body got huge. "I'm not here to make you well. I'm here to take you to another destination, some call it hell". Daniella wanted to believe that the entire episode was a joke, even though she began to smell smoke and squeezed her hads against her ears as the sounds of screeching, crying and nashing teeth filled the air and pushed its way into her brain. The doctor reached out and gave her a hug that pushed the remaining air out of her lungs, a hug that she couldn't, try as she might get out of and then there was darkness, a helpless type of darkness that she had never come into contact wih before. This all must be some terrible accident, a mistake of the worst sort she thought to herself. The helplessness she felt left her limp, drowning in regret, torture, and fear.