The Boy and the Beast

17| terminal

The waiting room is abandoned.

I'm the only person nervously fiddling in the cornered chair, my parents nervously bouncing their legs and whispering that everything will be okay. It's not as if the doctor wants to talk to you in person when you had a routine checkup.

My dad's hands have been locked up on his lap for the longest I've seen him still. His eyes are scurrying to find the possible explanation why we're in a waiting room.

To be honest, I'm waiting for an explanation too.

I know my neck, shoulders and back is hurt badly, but I didn't expect to wait for my doctor again. Especially not my general doctor.

The old doctor stalks into the room, his face as pale as the moon in the night sky, watching in from the window.

"Flynn," the doctor groans painfully, his voice waving us into his consulting room. My dad's first to jump up, quickly following his tracks, pulling my mother behind him. I follow suit into the room, the hall growing slimmer and slimmer.

I grip into my mother's arm to help lead the way, but she doesn't even look back at me. I close the door behind me, struggling with it; I'm shaking too much.

My heart thumps and my hands are drenched in sweat; I have no idea why.

"Thank you for coming on such short notice," he starts, leveling the file, my name stamped in red bulky letters across the pale yellow paper. "It has come to my attention that there's something wrong with Alistair's records." He clears his throat, his large eyes bulging through his thick glasses at my parents.

"Alistair has an abnormal amount of antibodies, which led us to more tests."

"What did the tests say?" My dad asks, his knuckles clenched white around the armrests.

"In easy language, Alistair started out by having common bone cancer, but it spread like wildfire across his entire body. He does not have cancer, cancer is him."

An unsettling silence bears down on the room, my heartbeat the only thing I can hear. The birds chirping outside quiets down. The lights dull down and leave a melancholic, dense atmosphere.

"There's nothing we can do, we can try. I'm sorry."

"Mama," I whisper, shaking her softly. She's vast asleep, buried beneath a thick fleece blanket and drool cascading down her cheek in a generous—yet disgusting—abundance. "Mama," I repeat, poking her side.

She inhales sharply before twisting over to face me with shut eyes. The drool twinkles in the night light shimmering from the open windows at both sides of the room. She blinks confusedly at me, as if she doesn't recognizes my complexion in the dark.

This is déjà vu from my childhood.

"Yeah?" She yawns, slowly sitting up. She runs her fingers through her beehive hairstyle, sticking up in all directions.