Hope

“Akka, akka!” 

She giggles, leaning back on the pristine, snow-white covers.

“Come hold my hand!”

I suppress a flinch, fingernails carving bloody crescents into my palm.

“Coming, love,” I say, pushing tears back into my eyes through the force of sheer will.

“I’m coming.”

I stalk forward, my body tense.

I hear my mother’s quiet sobs,

see my father’s anguish-filled face.

I didn’t know what my face looked like.

“Akka, play with me?”

I lose the battle, tears pouring out of my eyes and down my cheeks at those four words.

“Bored! I bored!” she says brightly, slurring the ‘r’,

making it sound like a ‘w’. 

(If she’s not old enough to pronounce a word correctly,

how is she old enough to get her leg cut open?)

(It’s not fair.)

I gather my little sister in my arms, 

and she buries her small face into my neck, still giggling.

I gaze pleadingly at the doctors behind her.

They look at me, eyes filled with sadness and pain and the hollowness

that comes with having to watch kids suffer.

I’m sorry, their eyes say. I’m so sorry.

(It was supposed to be just a scratch.)

(A miniscule splash of red across her skin;

it was never supposed to turn into this.)

(Never supposed to become so severe, so life-changing,

that my two-year-old sister had to be rolled into the surgical room

all alone.)

(Nine times.)

This was the ninth. 

My mother’s cries rise to a crescendo—

My father wraps his arms around her—

And I force myself away from the rolling hospital cot, 

pressing one last kiss to my baby sister's forehead. 

Her face crumples as I pull away,

and oh no, no, no, the anesthetic is wearing off.

“Akka?” she says, her small mouth turning down into a pout.

“Where you going?” 

I press my hand over my mouth in an attempt to stop my cries.

“Akka?”

I turn away.

“Will she be okay?" I ask, retreating to my parents' side,

arms curling around my body. 

I hear a soft whimper

and clench my jaw.

“Is this surgery the last one?”

The surgeons look at me, 

watch my crying mother with sorrow in their eyes,

gaze at my father who’s struggling to stay strong.

“It should be,” they say, the sorrow morphing to a wary kind of joy.

“It has to be.”

The nurses roll my sister down 

down

down 

the hall, through metal doors and

into the operating room.

---

I watch her small body be swallowed by the hospital sheets.

---

They say it’ll take time.

Two years—730 days.

Two years,

until my sister will be able to run again.

---

Two years later,

She does.