Fable
— · —
The ceiling is the wrong color.
That’s my first thought as I claw my way back to consciousness, and it takes me a slow, swimming moment to place it: not my apartment, not the store.
Hartsgrove Memorial. Hospital ceiling, hospital light.
I cling to the thought hard, because having thoughts means I’m not dead.
Dead people don’t complain about interior design.
Dead people don’t lie in uncomfortable beds noticing that the ceiling is industrial white instead of the friendly off-cream of their own apartment, that the lights are recessed and fluorescent instead of warm and yellow, that there’s a persistent beeping sound coming from somewhere to the left that’s either a heart monitor or the most annoying alarm clock in the world.
Hospital. You’re in a hospital. You’re not dead, you’re just concussed and horizontal and…
Something tugs at my forehead when I try to frown.
Stitches. I can feel them, a tight pulling sensation just above my left eyebrow, little threads holding my skin together like I’m a torn book that someone’s trying to repair.
Three of them, if my fuzzy counting is right, which it probably isn’t, because my head is pounding and my eyes won’t focus and everything feels like it’s happening on a slight delay.
Three stitches. Mild concussion. Some bruising. You’re fine. You’re completely fine. You’re just also in a hospital, which is less fine, but still fundamentally okay.
I try to lift my hand to touch the stitches, to confirm they’re real, to ground myself in something physical, but my arm feels like it weighs seven thousand pounds. Moving seems like a lot of effort. Breathing seems like a lot of effort. Existing seems like a lot of effort.
So I lie there instead, staring at the wrong ceiling, letting my brain slowly piece together what happened.
You were driving. You were going somewhere brave. You were almost there, and then there were headlights in the wrong lane, and then…
Glass. Metal. The sound of the world ending.
Warmth on my face. Blood, probably. Definitely blood.
And a face in the window. A hallucination. An angel.
Gray eyes. Black hair. A voice like calm in the middle of a storm, telling you to stay with him.
“I’m awake,” I inform the ceiling. “Just so you know. I’m awake and I remember things. Mostly. I remember most things. Some things. The important things.”
The ceiling doesn’t respond, which is fair.
“Oh, good, you’re awake.”
A nurse appears at the edge of my vision, kind eyes, sensible ponytail, scrubs with cartoon cats on them that probably make children feel better about being here. She’s holding a clipboard and a pen that looks like it’s been through at least three apocalypses.
“How are you feeling?” she asks, checking something on the monitor next to my bed. Her name tag says DEbrA, which feels like a trustworthy name. A name that knows how to handle paperwork and difficult patients and people who hallucinate angels in car wrecks.
“Like I got hit by a car.”
“Well, you did, so that tracks.” She smiles, and it’s the kind of smile that’s seen a lot of trauma and decided to stay kind anyway.
“Good news is, you got lucky. Mild concussion, some bruising, the stitches… but nothing broken, nothing internal. You’ll be sore for a few days, but you should make a full recovery. ”
Lucky.
That’s one word for it. It’s not the word I would have chosen. My picks were more along the lines of traumatized or still shaking or definitely never getting in a car again. Still, I appreciate the optimism.
“I’m going to need you to fill out some paperwork,” Debra continues, handing me the clipboard. “Standard stuff. Insurance information, medical history, emergency contact. We need someone to come take you home.”
Emergency contact.
Millie.
Thank God for Millie Vance. My best friend since college, the only person in the world who knows exactly how bad my driving anxiety is and has never once made me feel weird about it.
Millie, who will absolutely give me shit about this for the rest of my life (I can’t believe you finally decided to drive somewhere and immediately got hit by a car, that’s so on brand for you), but who will also bring me soup and sit with me and make sure I don’t spiral into a panic attack about getting behind the wheel again.
If I ever get behind the wheel again. Which I won’t. Probably. Definitely. I’m definitely never driving again.
One crisis at a time. Fill out the form. Call Millie. Go home. Panic about the future later.
I take the clipboard. My hands are shaking, I can see them trembling as I grip the pen, and my vision keeps doing this annoying thing where it swims at the edges like I’m looking at everything through water that won’t quite settle.
Name. Easy. You know your name.
I write FABLE LARKIN in careful letters, pressing hard because the pen is almost out of ink and it keeps skipping on the paper. The lines come out jagged and uneven, a seismograph recording a small earthquake.
Date of birth. Also easy. You know when you were born.
I write the numbers. Squint at them. They look right. Probably.
Address.
I write the address of Fable Tales, the bookstore and the apartment above it, my whole life in one crooked little building on Main Street. The pen drags and catches, and I have to trace over some of the letters twice to make them legible.
Emergency contact.
Millie Vance.
I write her name in the box, neat and clear, and then I move to the phone number.
This is where it goes wrong.
The thing about ADHD is that it doesn’t wait for convenient moments to malfunction.
It doesn’t say hey, you’re concussed and scared and trying to fill out important paperwork, so I’ll go easy on you.
It says actually, this seems like a great time to spin all the numbers in your head, a slot machine with no jackpot.
I’ve had Millie’s number memorized since freshman year. I’ve dialed it a thousand times, when I was sad, when I was anxious, when I was just bored and wanted to hear someone laugh at my terrible jokes. I could recite it in my sleep.
Except your brain is soup right now, isn’t it?
I stare at the little boxes on the form. Ten digits. How hard can it be?
Five-five-five…
That’s the area code. I know that. The area code is definitely five-five-five. Everyone’s area code is five-five-five around here.
…zero-one-nine-four…
Or is it nine-four-one-zero? Is the nine first or the zero? I can picture the numbers, but they keep swapping places, rearranging themselves like they’re playing musical chairs in my skull.
…two-seven-eight.
Or eight-seven-two.
Does it matter? It’s probably fine. Numbers are just numbers. Even if you mix up one or two, it’ll still go to Millie. Phone numbers don’t change that much when you transpose a digit.
I write the number in the boxes. Look at it. Squint at it. The numbers swim and blur, and I can’t tell anymore if they’re right or wrong or somewhere in between.
Close enough.
“There.” I let the clipboard clatter back onto the bed, suddenly exhausted in a way that goes beyond physical tiredness. “Done. Can I sleep now?”
“Rest is definitely encouraged.” Debra takes the paperwork, scanning it with practiced efficiency. “I’ll call your emergency contact and let them know you’re here. Shouldn’t be long.”
“Great. Perfect. Millie will come, and she’ll yell at me, and then she’ll take me home, and this whole day will be over.”
“That sounds like a solid plan.” Debra pats my shoulder in a way that’s probably supposed to be comforting. “Just rest. You’re safe now.”
I close my eyes.
Time goes weird after that.
Not weird in a dramatic, cinematic way, no trippy montages, no blurring clocks, no sense of reality fragmenting into artistic pieces. Just… syrupy. Thick. Like the minutes are wading through honey to get from one moment to the next.
I drift in and out of something that isn’t quite sleep.
The hospital sounds become a kind of white noise: footsteps in the hallway, rhythmic and steady.
The beep of monitors, mine and others, a whole symphony of heartbeats being tracked by machines.
Soft voices at the nurse’s station, words I can almost catch but not quite.
…admitted around seven…
…lucky she wasn’t going faster…
…someone’s coming for her?
That last one makes me try to surface, to drag myself back to full consciousness, but the effort is enormous and the pillow is soft and the drugs they gave me are doing something lovely to the edges of my panic, smoothing them down like sand in a wave.
Millie’s coming. Millie will be here soon. You can rest.
I rest.
At some point, minutes later or maybe hours, I become aware that someone is talking about me.
About me, not at me. A conversation happening just outside the door, voices low but not quite low enough to miss.
“Is she okay?”
A man’s voice. Low, quiet, with a steadiness to it that feels familiar in a way I can’t place. Like I’ve heard it before. Like it was the last thing I heard before the dark swallowed me up.
“She’s stable.” That’s Debra. I recognize her voice now, the particular warmth of it. “Three stitches, mild concussion, some bruising. Very lucky, all things considered.”
Lucky. There’s that word again.
“Yes.” A pause, weighted with something I’m too fuzzy to interpret. The kind of pause that means more than the words around it. “She is.”
Who IS that?
I should open my eyes. I should figure out who’s standing outside my room talking about me like they know me, like they have a reason to be here, like they have the right to ask if I’m okay.
But my eyelids weigh approximately seven thousand pounds each, and the pillow is so soft, and the drugs are still doing their thing with the edges of my panic, and whoever it is will still be there when I wake up.
Probably.
Millie. It’s probably Millie. She’s probably just arrived, and she’s talking to the nurse, and in a minute she’s going to come in here and yell at me for almost dying and then hug me for a really long time.
I let myself drift again.
When I finally drag myself back to the surface, all the way to the surface, eyes open, brain mostly functional, the light in the room has changed. It’s later now, that golden-orange tint that means sunset is bleeding through the blinds, and there’s someone standing by the door.
Talking to my nurse.
Towering over my nurse, actually. A mountain that learned how to wear clothes. Like someone took the concept of “tall” and decided it wasn’t ambitious enough.
He’s got his back partially to me, so I can’t see his face, but I can see the breadth of his shoulders, ridiculous, frankly, the kind of shoulders that belong on a lumberjack or a superhero or possibly a refrigerator, and the dark hair, neatly cut, and the sweater that looks soft and expensive and completely inappropriate for a hospital waiting room.
That’s not Millie.
Millie is five-foot-two on a good day. Millie has hair that she dyes a different color every three months and opinions about everything and a laugh that belongs to a tickled seal.
Millie would not be standing there looking like she just stepped off the cover of one of those “brooding billionaire” romance novels I keep recommending to Mrs. Patterson.
So who the hell is that?
I blink, trying to bring him into focus.
My vision is still doing the swimming thing, but less than before, and I can make out details now.
The way he holds himself, very still, very controlled, like every movement is deliberate.
The way he’s listening to Debra talk, head tilted slightly, giving her his full attention.
And then he turns, just a little, and I see his face.
Black hair. Storm-gray eyes. A jaw that could cut glass and a mouth that’s doing something complicated, hovering somewhere between concern and relief.
Wait.
WAIT.
That’s the angel. That’s my hallucination. That’s the man I called “pretty” while I was bleeding out in my car.
But he can’t be here. He wasn’t real. He was a product of my concussed brain, a comforting fiction my mind conjured up to make dying feel less scary.
Just a face in the chaos, put together from fragments of every romance hero I’ve ever read about, assembled by my subconscious into a greatest-hits compilation of fictional men.
Except he’s standing right there.
Except he’s very clearly real.
Except Debra is talking to him like he’s a person who exists, not a hallucination who should have dissolved the moment I woke up.
Maybe your brain is just casting a stranger in the role.
Concussions do that, right? Make you think you recognize people?
Make faces blur together? This is probably just some guy, a doctor, maybe, or a hospital administrator, and your addled brain is overlaying the angel onto him because it can’t tell the difference between memory and reality right now.
“You’ve got a very handsome hallucination,” I inform the nurse, because apparently my brain-to-mouth filter is still offline. Has been offline since the crash, possibly permanently.
Debra looks at me. Then at him. Then back at me, with an expression that suggests she’s rapidly reconsidering my cognitive status.
“Sweetie,” she says slowly, “that’s your emergency contact. He’s real. He’s been here two hours.”
I stare at her.
I stare at him.
He stares back, and his expression eases, relief, maybe, or satisfaction, or something else entirely that I don’t have the cognitive capacity to identify, and his eyes are gray, impossibly gray, exactly like the angel’s eyes were, except the angel was a hallucination and this man is apparently my emergency contact.
But my emergency contact is Millie. My emergency contact is five-foot-two and hates mornings and has a collection of novelty socks and would definitely, definitely not be standing there looking like someone carved him out of marble and gave him a really nice sweater.
My emergency contact is not a man I’ve never met.
My emergency contact is not a man who showed up at my hospital bed like it was the most natural thing in the world.
My emergency contact is…
“My WHAT?”
He steps forward, and his voice is exactly as steady as I remember from the crash, from what I thought was the crash, what I thought was a dying dream, what I’m now starting to suspect was maybe actually real:
“Hello, Fable.”