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Excerpt: Peeling the Onion
I've won. I'm tingling with energy and excitement; bowing to the judges,
accepting - it's the first tournament on the way to the Nationals, and I've just fought last year's champion... and the golden figure on its black
marble stand is mine.
A two-fingered whistle splits the silence; Hayden is waving his fists in
the air and shouting my name. I step back into the crowd and his arms go
around me... the kiss is long and fantastic and I don't think we can say
we're just friends any more.
"Save it for the bedroom, you two!" Sensai growls, but I'm too happy to
be embarrassed.
A star of shattered glass, cold against my temple.
Blackness.
Sinking in the woolly blackness, choking, drowning, suffocating.
I want to claw my way out but can't move, want to scream but don't know
how. The blackness is swallowing me and I know that if I can't fight it the
me will be gone and the blackness will go on without end.
Strapped on a bed; hard, jolting; pain jabbing, throbbing, screaming.
A woman looming over me... smiling... blue uniform - an ambulance?
"How's the pain?"
Past pain into a new dimension of horror; neck shredded, strangled;
spasms from hell.
Something over my face; I can't talk. Have to tell her, make her
understand, make her fix it! Squeeze my fist in the air, tightly and
rhythmically; desperately. I can't take much more, my fist screams.
The woman smiles. "Not too bad?"
A nightmare. It has to be a nightmare.
But even in a nightmare I'd never make an ambulance so uncomfortable.
This must be real.
The ambulance stops. A mask is pulled off my face. My bed bumps out into
fresh air; rolls through swinging plastic doors and past my parents. They're
huddled together, cold and shrunken.
I fade out again; open my eyes to a busy, clattering room with white
ceilings; an invisible child crying. Faces hover; white coats and nurses.
Deft strokes and sharp knives skinning me from tee shirt and jeans - new jeans; I'd have worn old ones if I'd known. And my tulip tee shirt, Aunt
Lieke sent it from Holland. Did I say that out loud?
"We'll save the motif if you want - you could soak out the blood and stitch it onto something else."
Must have. "It doesn't matter."
I remember now - Lieke's dead. Maybe it wasn't a lucky tee shirt.
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