Nine Open Eyes

The Prologue

Six-minute read

Eight Years Before...

Bowman's POV

Nurse Erina Bowman placed the nebuliser equipment back on the ledge, rolling up the oxygen tubes. Empty vials with dregs of Salbutamol and saline water shone on the steel table beside her, reflecting the harsh hospital lights.

Bowman glanced at the clock that overlooked the long hall meant to be the nurses' office. It had struck quarter past one. She gave her forehead a small rub, contemplating if she should have her third cup of coffee.

She'd had five patients in the past two hours since her shift had started. Midnight emergencies; a broken arm and a dislocated knee cap from a motorcycling accident, an over weight woman with rising blood/sugar levels, a small fever in a newborn that had persisted for the past six hours and lastly, a teenage girl with breathing issues. Chronic bronchitis, the girl had clarified, when Bowman had asked if she was asthmatic.

Bowman had taken up nursing out of her interest in serving others, her parents being Catholic had preached about selflessness her entire childhood and she had followed their example. It was only now that she peered down the darkened windows at people milling about, enjoying lives that she could never achieve that she seemed to rethink her decisions.

Her hands shook from the caffeine as she gripped the windowsill. The sleep a rising wave barely contained behind her eyes.

It was then that Bowman heard the unmistakable sounds that signalled a dire emergency. An ambulance wailed outside the hospital building, its brakes halting as footsteps rushed out to open the doors at the back. A stretcher was quickly taken out, two men taking it into the building. Towards her office.

She ran to a station, curtains stretched wide open as they came in carrying the patient.

Bowman gasped as she saw her. The girl was young, barely nine or ten. Her wings... Her wings had been burned. The feathers burned to char, the bones visible through the burnt skin and oozing blood.

She was placed onto her stomach on the hospital bed, the wings limp and touching the floor beside the bed. It was clear there was no sensation through them. The girl was unconscious.

Bowman took no risk as she injected lidocaine into a steel syringe. Carefully, not to hurt the shredded and burnt skin around her wings, she injected it through her arm. The girl gave no movement, yet the pulse under her neck quickened as the lidocaine entered her bloodstream.

She waited for the anaesthesia to show it's effects and then got to work with her antibiotic salves. Most of the skin on her back and arms was salvaged. But her wings had been damaged beyond repair.

A doctor was called through at the hospital office and he came rushing through the hospital doors, past the crying mother and the consoling father.

Bowman was immediately instructed to run an X-ray and ready the surgical equipment.

The X-ray that had been performed by the other hospital staff revealed that one wing had broken through the joint near her spine while the other seemed weirdly disoriented.

Bowman readied the assortment of slim knives, bent scissors, steel tweezers and stitching equipment. It was a removal surgery.

Having seen many such heart wrenching cases before this one, she'd thought she'd seen it all. But she was wrong.

Her heart became a throbbing ball of pain as the girl was wheeled into the theater, someone had tucked her wings onto the table. She came under the lights and her injuries became highlighted. The green and white salves lined burn marks and small bubbles under her wings. The wings themselves blackened, the feathers dull and crumbling.

The surgery itself was simple. Three of them stood over her, Bowman handing out equipment and placing them back bloodied on the white napkins. The surgeons took out her wings from her joints and then cleaned the joints themselves that had held them, lest bone splinters remain.

Yet her own wings, bright yellow and mute orange, recoiled at the pain it must've caused to be burned. And the even larger pain of having no wings at all. It was that thought that made her hands shake even more as she stitched the two parallel slits in the the girl's now wingless back. She stitched her carefully, artistically even. Making a small silhouette of wings through her stitches, an echo of what once was. She knew it was highly unprofessional yet she had to do it.

By the time she was finished, Bowman knew nursing was not meant for her, and she could not spend her life in the medical field. She could almost smell the paint hidden deep in the recesses of her cupboard beckon to her, the tiny glass pots coaxing her to open them and the long forgotten brushes by her bedroom window itching to be used again.

That night she left the hospital at four a.m. and bathed in the rising sun of the dawn of her new life.

The newspaper she picked on her way to the apartment read:

Alyson Grynn, 11, Burns Wings in Building Fire

A/N
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