Writing Prompt 59: Sunlight
Last Tuesday morning I woke up scratching at my hands.
Thinking nothing of it, I drank some water, went to the loo and suddenly became aware of strange lumps on the backs of my thighs. I ran upstairs to show my husband — I needed further diagnosis. The lumps itched like nothing else. I scratched at my hands again.
"It's a rash, as far as I can tell," he said. "It's going down the backs of your legs."
As the day progressed, so did the rash, spreading further over my body with spots popping up on my knees, my elbows, up my neck and at the outside corners of my eyes.
On Wednesday, I woke up after a fitful night's sleep feeling something unusual about my eyes. Looking in the mirror I could see the bright red, itchy rash had now spread all over my face, swelling my eyelids and creating big puffy bags under my eyes. The palms of my hands itched so badly I thought I might go mad.
My husband got up out of bed.
"I'm taking you to the hospital," he announced.
"I'll just put recycling out," I said. "And take the dog for a pee."
By the time I checked in at the hospital, it was 7.15 in the morning. My husband drove as if I might go into anaphylactic shock at any moment.
Three hours later, we were home.
The doctor said it might have been an allergic reaction to the antibiotics I'd been taking the previous few days. He was concerned about my swollen, itchy hands.
"Keep an eye on it,” he said, “and take antihistamine."
I showed him a selfie I’d taken three hours earlier. He'd obviously been expecting something far worse.
"Fair enough," he said, which I thought was an odd reaction to my swollen red face.
For this week, write about how you woke one morning and your world was suddenly quite different to how it was the day before. Maybe the story is about you, or maybe it's about someone you know.
Write it all down. Remember those details.
Until next time.
Eclipse
Lilian sits in a chair near the flowers she planted the previous Spring. The petals flutter in the warm evening breeze, glowing in the softening light as the sun begins to set.
She closes her eyes.
The air fills with the scent of jasmine: light, fragrant and sweet.
She opens her eyes.
Shapes and forms of colour splash across her field of vision. The edges bleed into each other like smudges of watercolour paint pooling over a wet sheet of paper. The lines formed by the thin branches of the young tree ahead of her appear in double vision, the edges rough, light falling between them. Her sight has been like this for some months now, failing month by month, day by day. Lilian hopes one day to wake up and find the world sharp and clear. Yet every day, she wakes to see the same.
"Nothing can be done," they said, every doctor she consulted.
She had to take that devastating information and somehow live with it. When Lilian told her mother and father, they wanted her to come home.
"You're too vulnerable to live alone," they said. "How will you cope?"
But Lilian insisted. She insisted on staying in her house, her small, neat house with the big, wild garden.
The light is starting to dim. This time of day is the hardest. Lilian knows she needs to move inside before the darkness sucks the light and she can’t see anything at all.
But the sun. Oh, the sun! That tiny piece of hope that sparkles through the leaves. The colour fills her eyes. She uses her fingers, tracing the shapes of light and colour in the air.
She hadn’t meant to look. It was just too compelling, the sun hidden by the moon’s shadow on a clear, bright morning.
"Don’t look," they said. "Don't look at the sun."
She didn’t listen. She looked. And now her life has changed.
Story first posted February 2019 // Photo:Tanya Clarke 2015
