Emery sat, the eggshell paint chipping, peeling off the walls. Her pale skin almost glowing a hazy aura from the harsh fluorescent lighting. With wallowing, melancholy eyes, she stared at the cream tile, stained with week old spilled coffees and tea. Minutes ticked by in what felt like hours, with the soft sound of the clock breaking the whitewashed silence. Her ears ring, the silence almost deafening.
Sitting next to her was a clear plastic cup, water halfway filling the space. Her leg jutted out in a contorted position that couldn’t have been comfortable, her elbow resting on the wood of the plush chair she sat in, the cushions absorbing her weak frame.
She watched.
She waited.
“Ms. Collins?” A fair woman with platinum hair tied back called her name. Her cheek bones showed prominent, her small frame drowned in the white lab coat.
The woman next to Emery stood up. She looked just as frazzled. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. Her hands wrung, her body writhed uncomfortably. She looked like a ghost, just as much as herself. As the turned the corner down the hallway, she heard the nurse's voice fade into the distance, reverberating off the walls and back to her. She could only make out a few phrases.
“You may feel slight discomfort...a few weeks along...change...gown...doctor…” It faded away.
“What the hell have I gotten myself into,” Emery thought. With bated breath, she took the alabaster pamphlet from its ivory holding and opened it. The paper stuck together slightly, and slowly, she began scanning over the words. The words became blurred with tears falling from her light eyes, dripping like a leaky faucet. Thirty seven minutes later, the nurse returned with her clipboard, Ms Collins followed behind walking slightly off, forward, and out the door of the clinic without so much as a word.
“Emery White?”
She stood up. She walked over. She blanked out what the nurse said. She only caught a few words and phrases.
“You may feel slight discomfort...a few weeks along...change...gown...doctor…”
Emery checked back in just in time to realize she was sitting in an observation room, the nurse handing her a white paper smock.
“Dress in this and the doctor will be here shortly. Don’t worry, it’s not his first procedure.”
His. He. A man. Of course it was a man. It was a man who had stricken her of her purity, her white aura that radiated off her like sunlight. Her innocence had been ripped from her body. Her once pearly, angelic attitude burned from her body with white hot flames, licking her wounds and opening new ones. Her gastly expression never changing. Fifty six minutes go by. Pain radiates through her entire body. Tears run over her unblemished skin, smooth as porcelain. Fifty six minutes go by and she exits the clinic, walking slightly off onto the snowy sidewalk.
Snow falls in flakes around her, getting caught in her hair, bouncing of the tip of her nose. Without realizing, it’s almost as if her glowing ashen aura was back. She walked, and walked, and walked, ridden and wracked with wallowing sadness. Slowly, cautiously, dreadfully, she walked into the white world, and disappeared into the pale fog, the snow falling in her recent footsteps.
It was almost as if she were never there.