H A R P Y
Ms. Believer
Greetings, all! In my creative writing class, we're encouraged to attempt to write a novel. This is my first chapter. During a review workshop, it received a fair amount of praise, so I feel like I want to continue the story. However, I'd like a second opinion or two, just I know my group wasn't just being nice.
It's a story about two childhood friends, Emma and Simon. They were the best of friends growing up, but ventured their separate ways upon high school graduation. When finally they reconnect, things go a little awry...
I'm terrible at summaries. This sounds like fanfiction. Forgive me.
(*^*)
“You idiot! Moron! I told you—leave mealone!”
That voice…
“I wish you never gave me that charm!”
Charm…?
“I’m sorry I ever met you!”
Stop it.
“I wish I never laid eyes on you!”
Stop talking.
“Go to hell!”
Stop talking!
“I hate you!”
STOP TALKING!
His eyes burst open and lungs seized the air with a frightening fury.
“Got him! There we go, kid, stay with us this time!”
“Oh my god… Oh my god, h-he’s alive! Thank the stars!”
Mother—his first thought at the sound of the second voice. But this person couldn’t be his mother, not a chance—she lacked entirely her signature southern twang, her lilting, drawn-out tones. This person spoke without accents in her soprano voice, with not-so-subtle hints of panic and relief coloring her words. Never had his mother sounded so emotional in his two decades of life. Maybe something happened? An accident?
His thoughts faded as his senses shifted into focus. The feeling of fire in his chest was the first to slam against his brain, but as his lungs drew breath after breath, the sensation slowly faded to a harsh sting against his heart. Odd, mechanical sounds rang with deafening whirs and beeps in his sensitive ears—odd, he had always been so hard of hearing—while a brilliantly bright light send his lids slamming shut to shield his eyes. His tongue felt like a rock inside his mouth, dry, misshapen, and out of place, while the scent of antiseptic assaulted his nose.
Saint John Medical Center.
What was he doing in a hospital? The name popped into his brain on its own. He knew the name, sure, but had never been inside. And yet every nook and cranny of the sick-tinged room, every mark in the linoleum, every lump in the mattress he knew on sight as though this place stood as a second home.
The light rolled away, offering his covered eyes some sense of relief. A twitch or two later, his lids lifted to find a blurry sight of the pocked ceiling tiles of a hospital room. Nurses at each side took note of his vitals, muttering medical jargon and soft words that he assumed were meant as encouragements. In the background, hushed sobs of the woman—his mother?—greeted his ears.
Strange. A familiarity tickled the back of his brain, telling him he knew this place and these nurses and those quiet cries pulling at his heart. But he knew he had never been here before. The only nurses he knew belonged to his pediatrician’s office a lifetime away and he never thought his mother capable of shedding a single tear in privacy, let alone breaking down in public. Ignoring the obvious fact that he laid in a hospital bed and just had his heart defibrillated, something seemed… off. Not right.
As the nurses finished up with their scans, he moved to sit upright. Before he could get even halfway, a bright bloom of agony spread across his chest and forced him back down.
“Arghh—!” His pain-fueled howl stopped short. That wasn’t his voice. He spoke with a higher pitch, not this baritone boom.
“Mr. Walsh,” voiced a nurse at his right. “Please, you can’t move around too much right now.”
Walsh?!
Never had his eyes stretched so wide—his eyes? Or someone else’s? No. No way, impossible.
“Jake, listen to the nurse, all right?” That voice again! Choked out through whimpers and cracked though it was, her voice elicited the same thought as it had before—mother.
His breaths came in short pants of panic as his eyes scanned each and every angle he could find without twisting his chest. Who was this Jake Walsh person and why did they think he was him? A desperate, grating urge to speak, to voice his concerns, to find answers clawed his grey matter to shreds, but he forced it down. No way. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t say a word. They would think he was crazy!
Maybe he was crazy…
The corner of his gaze caught the nod of one nurse to her colleague before her prompt exit. His wide eyes followed her out of the room. What was the nod for, he wondered. Did they know something? Could they explain this mess of his at all?
When his eyes returned to the front of the room, his form twitched with the urge to jump away, but the severe pain in his heart kept him still; Mother had moved closer, far too close for comfort, in his opinion. She stood a step away from the side of his bed, her hands clasped tightly in prayer. Upon first sight of her, he thought that perhaps he could pardon her sudden interest in a higher power—the mother he knew always scorned such frivolous thoughts—but such a thought came before his eyes landed on her face.
In place of straight, pitch-colored locks, a blonde pixie cut covered the woman’s skull. Where his real mother’s skin sat firm and thin along her bones, the imposter’s sagged slightly at her cheeks and jowls, and crow’s feet marked her years at her eyes. There sat no severe line on her mouth, but a gap between thinning lips muttering worship words. They looked nothing alike, acted nothing alike.
This was not his mother.
This was not his body.
Although he sensed the rising of his chest—his chest?—his lungs felt empty and drained. He sucked at the air, ordered the oxygen down his throat, but nothing—no relief. Just another flaming sensation at his core mixing with the sting the defibrillator left behind. Blaring beeps meant to signal his heart rate raced across the air until they became nothing but a grating drone in his ears, interrupted only by the long squeak of the door as the previous nurse burst in.
This was not his body.
Fresh cries echoed from the mouth of Mother. The nurses forced a mask over his face, muttered something about shock, about calm down, about everything’s going to be okay, about one thing and then another and something else and there was a sharp sting in the crook of his arm and those cries, god damn those cries of hers!
This was not his body!
And then darkness. Black. Slowly at first, and then all at once, as if he had been swallowed up by some monstrous, howling creature.
Strange, indeed, was the inner mind world of Simon Grant Matthews. Or perhaps it only seemed that way because this was his first time there. The sky hung overhead in the image of a maze of watercolor strokes, blue and greens and purples mixing and swirling in a haze. Mountains of junk sliced through the colored fog, consisting mostly of broken childhood toys and pictures and odd objects resembling gears rusted and morphed by time. Here and there, little creatures made of soot and cobwebs sorted through the piles.
Simon existed as an image of himself, though nothing more than a blurred projection quickly fading. He stood now in the middle of his world, wandering, lost, frightened, and watching his mind’s dust-bunnies go about their business. No sense of time remained in this place; what could have been a second may have been a day, or a year might be a minute. Every moment, every series of moments, felt both brand new and worn out at once, yet natural at the same time. It all made sense for the wandering soul while any observer would have surely gone mad; few beings existed who could comprehend another’s mind.
One such being—a god, one might say—hovered over Simon’s soul. A tendril of its conscience brushed against his own, though he felt nothing more than a tickle in his mind, like an itch beneath his skin, between his brain. It prodded his thoughts and memories, wishing to know more of the human below. Once satisfied, it pulled back.
“Simon Grant Matthews.”
The voice sounded from every direction and boomed across the vastness of Simon’s mind. It sent the soul flickering in fright as his head swiveled in search of the one who spoke. His gaze saw nothing but the panicked scurrying of the odd creatures at his feet. When he raised his head to search the sky, a sensation akin to the breath being forced from his lungs made itself known—his sky began to fade.
In mere mortal moments, gone was the watercolor maze overhead, every stroke and swirl of color bleached white and clean. But the erasure continued on, seemingly dissatisfied by the shades consumed. Not even the dust-bunnies seemed worthy enough of mercy. Absolute misery filled Simon’s soul and fleshed it out; no longer did the image flicker or fade, but stand firmly and enriched instead. Although no air passed his throat, he felt his chest heave and draw breath. The agony he felt to see his mind disappear subsided as the comfort of normalcy took hold, but only slightly. There still existed the matter of his mind disappearing, leaving nothing behind.
“No, not nothing,” sounded the voice once more answering his thoughts. It seemed amused this time and no less androgynous than before.
Again, Simon’s head reeled above his neck.
“Who are you,” he shouted into the now-empty space, surrounded by nothing but white.
Wait.
His voice…
That was his voice, his voice! No deep god-like boom! His tenor pitch echoed across invisible walls of white and total joy grappled with the sadness at his heart.
Simon spun in circles, still searching for the source of the voice, his soul shining with the gleam of human emotion. An almost chuckle mixed with the vestiges of his question. On what may have been his sixth go-around—or sixteenth, or six-hundredth—his gaze landed upon a familiar sight.
“Emma…”
“Emma?” Furry brows crinkled a forehead splashed with freckles. Her lips pressed together while jade orbs narrowed with curiosity behind her thick frames. “Ah, Emma! Of course, gosh, it only makes sense!”
…What?
The person—er, being before him looked just like her, sounded just like her, followed every quirk and habit right down to her signature gosh. And yet… something seemed off. Different.
“What… E-Emma, what are you talking about--?”
“Hold up there, bub. Name’s not Emma. But, I mean, well I guess it makes sense that I look just like her, y’know?” Not-Emma curved her lips with a roguish grin.
Simon simply stood there, eyes wide and blinking.
“… Yeah, okay, they told me this would be tough,” she said with a sigh.
“’They…?’ What, who are you—“
“Hush now. Did I say I was done talking? No? Bad boy. Shame on you.”
“Just tell me—!”
“Gosh, I’m trying to! now shush! Ahem.” Not-Emma straightened her stand and clasped her hand behind her back. Lids hid her eyes from view as she steeled herself for what was to come. Meanwhile, jaw slackened and mouth wide open, Simon furrowed his eyebrows; the blank space of his mind lay forgotten for now as the entity before him in the image of his friend hogged his focus.
Just when he began to wonder if his imagination had gone faulty and left his conscience stranded with some berserk construct, Not-Emma’s eyes burst open with all the force of an avenger. Her hands raised into the air with the perfect pitcher’s stance and without a moment to spare, drove an oddly-shaped object to his chest.
Simon heaved as yet again the breath was sent from his chest (that really needs to stop happening, voiced a stray thought). However, he felt no pain nor any need to puff the air. He was, as the empty space reminded him, just a projection in his head with no need for such trivial things as oxygen, food, and water. Again did a sense of sadness creep into his core as he clutched the gift with a single hand to his heart, his gaze downcast. Breathless and bitter, he wondered at the repetitive nature of his mind.
“This is no longer your mind.”
His eyes shot up to glance at Not-Emma, but she shook her head with her whimsical grin, answering his silent query. She was not the one who spoke. Simon raised his sight as though expecting a change in the alabaster scene. But of course nothing had changed. The voice belonged to whatever invisible being lay beyond the blank white, the same being who spoke his name and seemed to read his thoughts.
It continued on with its roaring tones, no more distinguishable than before. “Confused, are you? Yes, I suppose that is the proper human response. Hm. How long has it been, I wonder…?”
Disorienting though it may be, his panic had begun to wane. Simon found himself growing used to the oddities of this non-world. Instead of whirling in crazed circles or swiveling his head left and right, he clutched the object in his palm for comfort and swallowed a nonexistent lump in his throat.
“Please… explain what it going on here.” Unsteady, unsure, but desperate for information was the nature of his words. As he continued on, his own voice grew stronger, bolder, like a hammer upon the silence of the space. “What is this place? Who are you? What are you? And this person, this… this girl, this thing in front of me, why does she look like Emma?” Confusion first filled his tone, followed suit by rage. With every emotion filling his heart, his soul grew a little bit brighter. “Am I… am I dead? Did I die?” Dread.
“Ding, ding, ding! Right on it, bub!” Not-Emma spoke this time, with a finger in the air and a sad smile on her lips.
The Voice came after, “Yes. You are dead.” Simon’s face froze in its horrified expression. A large part of him expected the news. “Your soul exists here, in a plane outside the universe. Some humans refer to it as limbo, or Purgatory; a paradoxical expanse consisting of every possibility and nothing at all.
“Some may call me a god, but such a word is unfit for my kind. I am what you will become, in time. But that is eons from now. As for the entity before you…”
“That’s me!” At Simon’s side, Not-Emma waved frantic hands above her head as jumped around with pure joy. He couldn’t help but lean his gaze towards the short, bouncing mahogany curls sprouting from her skull. She liked to keep them tied in a single, long braid across her shoulder, he thought. How many times had he tugged that braid to make her want to chop it…?
“Ah, hello? Earth to Simon!”
Emma’s voice—no, Not-Emma’s voice sprung him from his daze and he shook his head free of the memories clogging his mind. “Hm? Oh, uh… sorry, what?”
“Gosh, you really need to pay attention. Anyways, as I was saying… Look down.”
He raised a brow at her odd request, but that only caused her grin to stretch further along her face.
“What are you—?”
“Look. Down. In your hand, I mean!”
Oh. That’s right, she threw something at him. With one last wary glance towards the familiar face, he lowered his hand from his chest and let his fingers fall open. He blinked once, twice before his vision turned cloudy with tears.
“Ding, ding, ding,” she repeated, a murmur this time. “Right on it, bub.”
It's a story about two childhood friends, Emma and Simon. They were the best of friends growing up, but ventured their separate ways upon high school graduation. When finally they reconnect, things go a little awry...
I'm terrible at summaries. This sounds like fanfiction. Forgive me.
(*^*)
“You idiot! Moron! I told you—leave mealone!”
That voice…
“I wish you never gave me that charm!”
Charm…?
“I’m sorry I ever met you!”
Stop it.
“I wish I never laid eyes on you!”
Stop talking.
“Go to hell!”
Stop talking!
“I hate you!”
STOP TALKING!
His eyes burst open and lungs seized the air with a frightening fury.
“Got him! There we go, kid, stay with us this time!”
“Oh my god… Oh my god, h-he’s alive! Thank the stars!”
Mother—his first thought at the sound of the second voice. But this person couldn’t be his mother, not a chance—she lacked entirely her signature southern twang, her lilting, drawn-out tones. This person spoke without accents in her soprano voice, with not-so-subtle hints of panic and relief coloring her words. Never had his mother sounded so emotional in his two decades of life. Maybe something happened? An accident?
His thoughts faded as his senses shifted into focus. The feeling of fire in his chest was the first to slam against his brain, but as his lungs drew breath after breath, the sensation slowly faded to a harsh sting against his heart. Odd, mechanical sounds rang with deafening whirs and beeps in his sensitive ears—odd, he had always been so hard of hearing—while a brilliantly bright light send his lids slamming shut to shield his eyes. His tongue felt like a rock inside his mouth, dry, misshapen, and out of place, while the scent of antiseptic assaulted his nose.
Saint John Medical Center.
What was he doing in a hospital? The name popped into his brain on its own. He knew the name, sure, but had never been inside. And yet every nook and cranny of the sick-tinged room, every mark in the linoleum, every lump in the mattress he knew on sight as though this place stood as a second home.
The light rolled away, offering his covered eyes some sense of relief. A twitch or two later, his lids lifted to find a blurry sight of the pocked ceiling tiles of a hospital room. Nurses at each side took note of his vitals, muttering medical jargon and soft words that he assumed were meant as encouragements. In the background, hushed sobs of the woman—his mother?—greeted his ears.
Strange. A familiarity tickled the back of his brain, telling him he knew this place and these nurses and those quiet cries pulling at his heart. But he knew he had never been here before. The only nurses he knew belonged to his pediatrician’s office a lifetime away and he never thought his mother capable of shedding a single tear in privacy, let alone breaking down in public. Ignoring the obvious fact that he laid in a hospital bed and just had his heart defibrillated, something seemed… off. Not right.
As the nurses finished up with their scans, he moved to sit upright. Before he could get even halfway, a bright bloom of agony spread across his chest and forced him back down.
“Arghh—!” His pain-fueled howl stopped short. That wasn’t his voice. He spoke with a higher pitch, not this baritone boom.
“Mr. Walsh,” voiced a nurse at his right. “Please, you can’t move around too much right now.”
Walsh?!
Never had his eyes stretched so wide—his eyes? Or someone else’s? No. No way, impossible.
“Jake, listen to the nurse, all right?” That voice again! Choked out through whimpers and cracked though it was, her voice elicited the same thought as it had before—mother.
His breaths came in short pants of panic as his eyes scanned each and every angle he could find without twisting his chest. Who was this Jake Walsh person and why did they think he was him? A desperate, grating urge to speak, to voice his concerns, to find answers clawed his grey matter to shreds, but he forced it down. No way. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t say a word. They would think he was crazy!
Maybe he was crazy…
The corner of his gaze caught the nod of one nurse to her colleague before her prompt exit. His wide eyes followed her out of the room. What was the nod for, he wondered. Did they know something? Could they explain this mess of his at all?
When his eyes returned to the front of the room, his form twitched with the urge to jump away, but the severe pain in his heart kept him still; Mother had moved closer, far too close for comfort, in his opinion. She stood a step away from the side of his bed, her hands clasped tightly in prayer. Upon first sight of her, he thought that perhaps he could pardon her sudden interest in a higher power—the mother he knew always scorned such frivolous thoughts—but such a thought came before his eyes landed on her face.
In place of straight, pitch-colored locks, a blonde pixie cut covered the woman’s skull. Where his real mother’s skin sat firm and thin along her bones, the imposter’s sagged slightly at her cheeks and jowls, and crow’s feet marked her years at her eyes. There sat no severe line on her mouth, but a gap between thinning lips muttering worship words. They looked nothing alike, acted nothing alike.
This was not his mother.
This was not his body.
Although he sensed the rising of his chest—his chest?—his lungs felt empty and drained. He sucked at the air, ordered the oxygen down his throat, but nothing—no relief. Just another flaming sensation at his core mixing with the sting the defibrillator left behind. Blaring beeps meant to signal his heart rate raced across the air until they became nothing but a grating drone in his ears, interrupted only by the long squeak of the door as the previous nurse burst in.
This was not his body.
Fresh cries echoed from the mouth of Mother. The nurses forced a mask over his face, muttered something about shock, about calm down, about everything’s going to be okay, about one thing and then another and something else and there was a sharp sting in the crook of his arm and those cries, god damn those cries of hers!
This was not his body!
And then darkness. Black. Slowly at first, and then all at once, as if he had been swallowed up by some monstrous, howling creature.
Strange, indeed, was the inner mind world of Simon Grant Matthews. Or perhaps it only seemed that way because this was his first time there. The sky hung overhead in the image of a maze of watercolor strokes, blue and greens and purples mixing and swirling in a haze. Mountains of junk sliced through the colored fog, consisting mostly of broken childhood toys and pictures and odd objects resembling gears rusted and morphed by time. Here and there, little creatures made of soot and cobwebs sorted through the piles.
Simon existed as an image of himself, though nothing more than a blurred projection quickly fading. He stood now in the middle of his world, wandering, lost, frightened, and watching his mind’s dust-bunnies go about their business. No sense of time remained in this place; what could have been a second may have been a day, or a year might be a minute. Every moment, every series of moments, felt both brand new and worn out at once, yet natural at the same time. It all made sense for the wandering soul while any observer would have surely gone mad; few beings existed who could comprehend another’s mind.
One such being—a god, one might say—hovered over Simon’s soul. A tendril of its conscience brushed against his own, though he felt nothing more than a tickle in his mind, like an itch beneath his skin, between his brain. It prodded his thoughts and memories, wishing to know more of the human below. Once satisfied, it pulled back.
“Simon Grant Matthews.”
The voice sounded from every direction and boomed across the vastness of Simon’s mind. It sent the soul flickering in fright as his head swiveled in search of the one who spoke. His gaze saw nothing but the panicked scurrying of the odd creatures at his feet. When he raised his head to search the sky, a sensation akin to the breath being forced from his lungs made itself known—his sky began to fade.
In mere mortal moments, gone was the watercolor maze overhead, every stroke and swirl of color bleached white and clean. But the erasure continued on, seemingly dissatisfied by the shades consumed. Not even the dust-bunnies seemed worthy enough of mercy. Absolute misery filled Simon’s soul and fleshed it out; no longer did the image flicker or fade, but stand firmly and enriched instead. Although no air passed his throat, he felt his chest heave and draw breath. The agony he felt to see his mind disappear subsided as the comfort of normalcy took hold, but only slightly. There still existed the matter of his mind disappearing, leaving nothing behind.
“No, not nothing,” sounded the voice once more answering his thoughts. It seemed amused this time and no less androgynous than before.
Again, Simon’s head reeled above his neck.
“Who are you,” he shouted into the now-empty space, surrounded by nothing but white.
Wait.
His voice…
That was his voice, his voice! No deep god-like boom! His tenor pitch echoed across invisible walls of white and total joy grappled with the sadness at his heart.
Simon spun in circles, still searching for the source of the voice, his soul shining with the gleam of human emotion. An almost chuckle mixed with the vestiges of his question. On what may have been his sixth go-around—or sixteenth, or six-hundredth—his gaze landed upon a familiar sight.
“Emma…”
“Emma?” Furry brows crinkled a forehead splashed with freckles. Her lips pressed together while jade orbs narrowed with curiosity behind her thick frames. “Ah, Emma! Of course, gosh, it only makes sense!”
…What?
The person—er, being before him looked just like her, sounded just like her, followed every quirk and habit right down to her signature gosh. And yet… something seemed off. Different.
“What… E-Emma, what are you talking about--?”
“Hold up there, bub. Name’s not Emma. But, I mean, well I guess it makes sense that I look just like her, y’know?” Not-Emma curved her lips with a roguish grin.
Simon simply stood there, eyes wide and blinking.
“… Yeah, okay, they told me this would be tough,” she said with a sigh.
“’They…?’ What, who are you—“
“Hush now. Did I say I was done talking? No? Bad boy. Shame on you.”
“Just tell me—!”
“Gosh, I’m trying to! now shush! Ahem.” Not-Emma straightened her stand and clasped her hand behind her back. Lids hid her eyes from view as she steeled herself for what was to come. Meanwhile, jaw slackened and mouth wide open, Simon furrowed his eyebrows; the blank space of his mind lay forgotten for now as the entity before him in the image of his friend hogged his focus.
Just when he began to wonder if his imagination had gone faulty and left his conscience stranded with some berserk construct, Not-Emma’s eyes burst open with all the force of an avenger. Her hands raised into the air with the perfect pitcher’s stance and without a moment to spare, drove an oddly-shaped object to his chest.
Simon heaved as yet again the breath was sent from his chest (that really needs to stop happening, voiced a stray thought). However, he felt no pain nor any need to puff the air. He was, as the empty space reminded him, just a projection in his head with no need for such trivial things as oxygen, food, and water. Again did a sense of sadness creep into his core as he clutched the gift with a single hand to his heart, his gaze downcast. Breathless and bitter, he wondered at the repetitive nature of his mind.
“This is no longer your mind.”
His eyes shot up to glance at Not-Emma, but she shook her head with her whimsical grin, answering his silent query. She was not the one who spoke. Simon raised his sight as though expecting a change in the alabaster scene. But of course nothing had changed. The voice belonged to whatever invisible being lay beyond the blank white, the same being who spoke his name and seemed to read his thoughts.
It continued on with its roaring tones, no more distinguishable than before. “Confused, are you? Yes, I suppose that is the proper human response. Hm. How long has it been, I wonder…?”
Disorienting though it may be, his panic had begun to wane. Simon found himself growing used to the oddities of this non-world. Instead of whirling in crazed circles or swiveling his head left and right, he clutched the object in his palm for comfort and swallowed a nonexistent lump in his throat.
“Please… explain what it going on here.” Unsteady, unsure, but desperate for information was the nature of his words. As he continued on, his own voice grew stronger, bolder, like a hammer upon the silence of the space. “What is this place? Who are you? What are you? And this person, this… this girl, this thing in front of me, why does she look like Emma?” Confusion first filled his tone, followed suit by rage. With every emotion filling his heart, his soul grew a little bit brighter. “Am I… am I dead? Did I die?” Dread.
“Ding, ding, ding! Right on it, bub!” Not-Emma spoke this time, with a finger in the air and a sad smile on her lips.
The Voice came after, “Yes. You are dead.” Simon’s face froze in its horrified expression. A large part of him expected the news. “Your soul exists here, in a plane outside the universe. Some humans refer to it as limbo, or Purgatory; a paradoxical expanse consisting of every possibility and nothing at all.
“Some may call me a god, but such a word is unfit for my kind. I am what you will become, in time. But that is eons from now. As for the entity before you…”
“That’s me!” At Simon’s side, Not-Emma waved frantic hands above her head as jumped around with pure joy. He couldn’t help but lean his gaze towards the short, bouncing mahogany curls sprouting from her skull. She liked to keep them tied in a single, long braid across her shoulder, he thought. How many times had he tugged that braid to make her want to chop it…?
“Ah, hello? Earth to Simon!”
Emma’s voice—no, Not-Emma’s voice sprung him from his daze and he shook his head free of the memories clogging his mind. “Hm? Oh, uh… sorry, what?”
“Gosh, you really need to pay attention. Anyways, as I was saying… Look down.”
He raised a brow at her odd request, but that only caused her grin to stretch further along her face.
“What are you—?”
“Look. Down. In your hand, I mean!”
Oh. That’s right, she threw something at him. With one last wary glance towards the familiar face, he lowered his hand from his chest and let his fingers fall open. He blinked once, twice before his vision turned cloudy with tears.
“Ding, ding, ding,” she repeated, a murmur this time. “Right on it, bub.”
