Awakened in Death

Mrs. Barris was not a woman to contend with. Her face was stern, and her features sharp and grave, as if carved from stone. Such definitive features would've been called beautiful on another woman, but the coldness of her expression, gave them an air of power and intimidation--a fact she exploited to her advantage at her business meetings around the world.
It was a well known fact that if Barris was working on any business case, it would be completed to perfection, and woe be it to anything or anyone that stood in her way.

She was on one such task, preparing for a big merger between several smaller trade companies, when she received the call from a very skittish receptionist that there had been accident with her daughter.

As cold and stern as Mrs. Barris appeared to her coworkers, at the sound of her daughter's situation, she crumpled to the floor, phone held limply in one perfectly manicured hand. Her daughter was in the hospital. Her daughter would not wake up.

She canceled the meeting.


She took the next flight out to Paris, and here she was six weeks later sitting next to the hospital bed staring at the body of her daughter. It looked so alien with the tubes in her mouth, the tape against her eyelids that were still puffed black and blue. The whoosh and clicks and beeps and lights and monitors of the machines that seemed to dominate the room bothered her greatly, and she had complained several times to have them silenced or removed, they were keeping her daughter from getting proper rest.

The doctors had said it was a miracle she was still alive. The taxi they had found her in had been completely destroyed, but it seemed that the way in which the impact had occurred had actually saved her life. Misha had been cocoonned inside a metal shell and saved from a great deal of the impact. Broken ribs, splintering in her legs, lacerations to her head and abdomen from shattered glass, but she was still breathing.
This miracle grew quickly dim as tests would come back saying her brain responses were unnatural. There was no regularity in neural impulses. There was no sign of change.

After the second week the breath that seemed to be a miracle only taunted the doctors and the desperate mother that clung to the side of the bed watching as what was left of Misha's body went into multiple organ failure.
They had put her on life support to pump her heart and fill her lungs with oxygen.
They had run more tests.
There was no change.

Misha's mother had taken a leave of absence from work, rented a hotel room that remained unused as she spent her waking hours at the hospital, and the night hours curled up next to her daughter. The finale had been pushed back until Brandon had recovered. The critics had greeted it warmly, but with mild reviews. The stage group had split up and moved on, and life had continued around them, but still Misha lay, unmoving, unresponsive.

"Mrs. Barris, I think we need to make a decision," the doctor said quietly, looking sadly at the woman with the rumpled shirt and disheveled hair sitting in front of him, not listening, not really looking at anything but her daughter.

"Has there been any changes? Any signs?" She asked quietly, blinking the redness out of deeply shadowed eyes.

There was no response.

"What do you recommend I do?"

"You have the choice of leaving her as she is now. There are medical cases where people still wake up. And I would not be the person to take that hope away from you. However, in considering the case that she is not simply in a coma, but being kept alive by us, even if she were to "awaken," I do not believe she would be able to function."

"Function?"

"She would be a vegetable, Mrs. Barris. There is no regular identifiable brain activity. There is nothing to show us that she is still alive."

"Her heart is beating."

"It is beating because we are beating it. If that machine were turned off, the body of your daughter would die. But I would not go so far as to say that Misha is now in that body, there is no sign of life in her brain. There is no sign of life in her.


Misha stared at her mother, placing one had gently on the stooped shoulders.
"Mama, what are you doing here?" She looked around the room, and the machines, the people in lab coats, the sterile floors and walls. And then she noticed herself laying next to her, but with eyes closed and battered and bruised.

"Mama, what's going on?"

She couldn't hear their voices, everything was muffled and blurred around her, as if she was seeing everything from a lens that was just slightly out of focus.



"If I sign these release forms, and they unplug.... and they unplug my daughter, she will die?"

"Yes."

"Isn't there anything else that we could possibly do? Are there no more tests, no more procedures that could save her? bring her back to me?"

"With the knowledge that is available to us now, I'm afraid there is nothing more that we can do."

"So there is no other way?"

"I am afraid not."

"Will she suffer?"

"No."



Misha watched, confused, as this man who looked like a doctor was talking to her mother. She tried to talk with both of them, tugging on their arms, waving her hands in front of their faces, screaming and stomping and even hitting them, but they were unresponsive. She was completely invisible to them.



Three nurses came in to remove the tubes, the feeding lines and turn off the heart monitor. The noises of the machines had finally stopped, but the quiet in the room was now eerie and grew almost menacing around the hospital bed.
Mrs. Barris knelt close, resting her cheek against her daughters face, weeping quietly. "I love you, Misha. I love you with all my heart. I love you I love you I love you," she whispered, rocking back and forth, her whispers growing frantic and desperate as she felt the heartbeat slowing in her daughter's body.


"Mama? Mama!" Misha cried. She threw herself against her mothers kneeling figure, feeling the walls around the hospital start to melt away as everything grew lighter.
"I love you, Misha. I love you with all my heart. I love you I love you I love you," she heard through the unfocused haze.

"I love you too." She whispered back, and willed her arms to wrap around her mother's frame. She had the realization that she was dying.


Mrs. Barris felt a warmth fill her body, and the air seemed to move against her ear. "I love you," it seemed to say. And then there was a heartbeat. And then there wasn't.




Misha felt herself being wrenched away into a blinding light that seemed to sear through her, leaving nothing around her but light so white it burned everything and left nothing but light and light and light everywhere. And she seemed to be racing forwards into this light, moving blindingly fast, hurtling ahead.
And then there were voices and images around her, ones she remembered from her life. There were images from other peoples lives and they all seemed to meld together in this light, this infinitely expansive light. The voices around her blurred and became a soft but persistent hum that seemed to swirl around her, indistinct but growing stronger.

And then somewhere from behind, somewhere from where she had been there came a voice so strong and clear, it pierced through the light and through the blur of noise and grabbed her, drawing her backwards.

Night time sharpens, heightens each sensation
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination

Misha turned, searching for that voice, and the drone of sound around her seemed to quiver, indignant, and the light seemed to intensify pulling her along faster and faster. And then there was the voice again, stronger, more powerful, locking its grasp on her and dragging her backwards away from the light into the calming darkness.

Let your mind start a journey to a brave new world
Leave all thoughts of the life you knew before
Let your soul take you where you want to be
Only then can you belong to me...

And as the voice faded away, so did the light.
Everything was dark again.