Welcome

Almost gone. I was almost gone. I could still make out the lights then. The lights of the bright white room. I was a prisoner there. Held captive against my own will. All the wires connected to every vein and nerve ending. Tubes in every orifice. There were liquids and solids alike chugging into my failing body. I remember it as being quite unpleasant. The beeps and whirs of the machines all around my bed. The IV trying to catch up to the levels that the morphine should be released in. It was all fading. My mind started to become unclear at that point. Clouded over like getting lost in the fog. I wanted to move but all mobility had left me by then. I wanted to speak but my voice had gone too. I didn't want to be there. Yet, I had to stay. Now there were faint sounds that my brain identified as human footsteps. A door creak. Then more footsteps close to me. Two or three people. Here to see me off on my journey into the unknown. A journey I never wished to take. The blips in one of the monitors sounded as if they were flailing around trying to escape. As if they knew what horrible misfortune might fall upon them once they fell in a straight line. I could only see shadows of people. Dimming images of what I remembered them to look like. I was too far gone now. I had no chance. At that moment, a spasm went through me, knocking the IV with its tubes to the ground. It must have scared the people because they did nothing to restore my morphine flow. Now I was going. Going. The beeps fell flat on the screen. Gone.

Then I woke up. My family crowded around my bed at home with pointed party hats on their heads. They held a large 
cake with writing in bright red icing...

"Welcome to Purgatory."

The writer is a grade 6 student of Sunbeams School.