Knocking on Heaven's Door | 𝐒𝐀𝐌 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑

10 - EMBERS IN THE DUST

When she woke, she thought of him. When she laid her head on her satin pillowcase, the sheen material disappearing under her curls, she thought of him then, too. On her daily walk to her apartment, while she waited for fifteen minutes in line at the food court, and in her classes while her professors' voices droned in spirals through her ears - all moments were glazed over with daydreams. The very thought of Sam Winchester had painted her mind with a glossy, boylike sheen.

She thought of other things, too. In darker moments, when light didn't shine through the library windows, or when she sat alone in her dorm after dinner, she thought of how she was dying. In these times, Sam was no longer an acolyte of the sun. Instead, he was the harbinger of the space between the moon and the stars, trading warm rays for a black nothingness that devoured.

It was devouring Bellona with every day that she lived, but she could not avoid it. Instead, she was forced to confront it in fragments, at random times being faced with shattered pieces of a future that could never be hers.

When an unexpected migraine pummeled her temples, she saw the inky black Sam then, seemingly bright but leaden with regrets. She would close her eyes and there he would stand: two feet away and holding her face between his hands, whispering the hopes of her dream as she grew nauseous. They were small symptoms at first. And still, they would force her to see him. He was the Sam of the future - her Sam - a Sam she could never truly call her own, so he was plagued to live as an abyss in her mind whenever cancerous symptoms arose.

"No, Mom." Bellona's voice was like a string pulled too tight, wrapped too many times around a guitar's fret. It was low. It bubbled as she spoke, trembling beneath the excess pressure and praying she wouldn't break.

Agnes persisted. "Are you sure? No problems with speech or anything?"

Bellona only shook her head. With every syllable she forced out of her aching throat, with every pluck of the stretched-out wires in her mouth, she grew closer to cracking. Water swelled more in her eyes, so much so that she feared anything more than a slight shake of her head would beckon the salt-infested waters to dance on her cheeks.

The younger girl visited her mother every morning before her classes, but the more she visited, the tighter her internal threads were pulled. Agnes found a way to bring Bellona's condition up in every visit, despite her daughter's insistence that she did not want to talk about it. She hardly even wanted to think about it.

"Okay. If your symptoms get worse, please tell me. We have to talk about your next steps," Agnes said. Her voice was so heavy that Bellona was surprised it didn't fall to the floor in front of her. She supposed, though, that it had learned to fly. It was always laden with burden, ever since the diagnosis - it would have to evolve if it did not want to fall.

Bellona nodded. "I've been thinking about radiation therapy. The doctors have called me about it a few times."

She chose to leave out the fact that the doctors had been calling her about Agnes, too. So had lawyers. They wanted to know if Bellona held a copy of her mother's will, or if she wanted to request one. If she planned on using this funeral home or that one, if Agnes wanted to prolong her treatment. She'd grown to despise the career she used to chase. She did not want to open her eyes one day and find that her job was to wait for another person to pass. She never wanted to pluck coins from their mourners before their body had even passed into the soil.