THIS IS A STORY

by _NAME_

Story No. 49

The stallion walked through the white, sterile hallway with some unease, a small bouquet of flowers clutched in his magical grasp.

He glanced at every room he passed, looking at both the number posted outside and the patient residing inside each.

There was a loud, wet cough from one of the rooms in front of him, and he grimaced and gave the doorway a wide berth as he went by.

Further ahead, in a different room, was a mare hunched over a body lying on the bed, sobbing so loudly it was likely the whole floor could hear.

Tearing his eyes away from other’s lives, the stallion picked up his pace, but soon came to an intersection and waited as a nurse passed through, pushing a sickly stallion in a wheelchair and the oxygen tank he was breathing from.

A few doors later, he eventually came to the room he was searching for.

With a hesitant, warning knock, he opened the door to find all the blinds drawn and the light off.

He crept into the room and opened the blinds slightly, illuminating the sleeping form of his mother, wrapped up in blankets, breathing peacefully.

The steady beep of her heart monitor filled the silence.

A sad smile gracing his lips, the stallion replaced the dying flowers in a vase on her nightstand with the ones he brought and sat down in one of the chairs.

He waited there for a long while, watching, unwilling to wake her up.

And then, without warning, his mother was jolted awake as the terrible, painful cough that plagued her racked her body, rendering her winded and gasping for breath.

When she was done, the stallion greeted her and offered some water that had been sitting on the table, but she quickly refused and was consumed by another stint of coughing, doubling over in pain.

He felt sad and useless, knowing that there was no way he could help his mother, however much he wanted to.

As her fit subsided again, the stallion urged her not to talk, but she did anyway, forcing out a few words in her hoarse, broken voice.

They spoke a little about how she was feeling and what was going on in the stallion’s life before they were cut short as another attack overtook her, even worse than the previous ones.

And when that was over, minutes later, she was in far too much pain to even breath, let alone talk, so the stallion tried to comfort her as best he could.

But she started again seconds later, and he could only watch as her infection wrecked her body and throat, the time between each fit getting shorter and each one getting longer.

He talked to her in between three more bouts of increasingly more intense coughing before he went to go fetch a nurse to help out.

As the nurse began to tend to his mother, the stallion felt that it was time to leave and said goodbye, giving his mother’s convulsing body a slight hug.

He made way out, reminding her that he would be back later that week, and took care to get some sanitizer as he left.

He went home.

Comments

[Dark Avenger]

This was rather depressing...

[_NAME_]

4617379

Unfortunately, hospitals often are...