“Come on, honey, come to dinner!” the mother called her daughter who was swinging on the swing in the yard. Obedient Matilda went to the dining table where her mom and dad had been waiting for her. It was a carefree period for an eight-year-old girl who spent her time at leisure – helping her mummy with household chores and coloring in her coloring book.
One morning, bad news appeared on TV forecasting an oncoming period of food shortage for which it wasn’t known how long it would last. It turned out afterward that the scarcity had lasted for three years. Despite the fact that they had bought food for quite some pantry, that wasn’t enough, so they were starving during the last year of the big food shortage. That deficiency of necessary nutrients reflected upon Matilda’s health, and each day her immune system started getting weaker and weaker. During the last couple of months, she was fighting for weeks with an unbeatable fever which did not leave her at peace.
The fevers sometimes lasted for an entire week. After the recuperation and the horrible crisis, Matilda got better; nevertheless, the exhausting period of time she had lived through, in the years when her body was developing, certainly left some consequences on her health. She started to have check-ups periodically, every other month, so going to the hospital wasn’t a strange thing to her at all.
On one Thursday morning, she went to a regular check-up with her parents. Like many times before, she was taken to the room where many medical examinations were performed. She was sitting on the chair, spinning in it occasionally and looking around herself, when she noticed that the eye test poster wasn’t on the wall. She was really startled and immediately turned toward the table where the doctor was sitting, wanting to ask when they had moved the poster because she liked it very much and wanted to take a photo of it as a memento.
However, there wasn’t anyone in the doctor’s chair. This seemed pretty weird to her, inasmuch as she'd been listening to that annoying typing sound of the keyboard just a couple of minutes ago while he was entering data into her digital medical record. She got up, walked to the door, peered through it, and saw that her parents were not in the waiting room. She thought they went outside to smoke a cigarette, but nevertheless, she decided to find the nurse on duty and ask her if she had seen them. She went to the room where she knew for sure the nurse was staying, but the room was empty. While freaking out in that room, she noticed that something weird was going on with the lights in the hallway.
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After stepping into the hallway, the lights went down and started shining much dimmer than before, together with one red bulb that emitted red emergency light. Realizing that this condition did not mean good, she began to hear alarm sounds, such sounds as in a state of emergency or evacuation. She rushed towards the exit, looking left and right all the time and worrying about what she was seeing – empty hallways and rooms, without any sound, and with dim light. The entire hospital was desolate! Every second, her heart pumped the next dose of adrenaline, and this continued on and on, without stopping. She finally decided to go home, which was very close to the hospital, due to her frequent visits. After a few minutes, she found herself in front of the familiar creaking door. There wasn’t any light in the hallway; she thought that there might have been a power outage in town.
There was a strange, musty odor in the air. Her footsteps stirred clouds of dust behind her. “How is this possible when Mother cleans up every week!” she thought. After realizing that the first floor was empty, she rushed upstairs in a panicky manner to find her parents. There was not a single living soul on the second floor. In her room, still not understanding what was happening, she fell to her knees and burst into tears. After half an hour of wetting her cheeks, she hopelessly went outside.
Time passed unrealistically fast, and from the beautiful morning clouds, there was now a blanket of darkness in the sky. Not even the stars peered curiously from the navy-blue veil. It was as if the world had stopped. There was no one on the streets, even the wind was gone. The moment she noticed that she no longer felt cold, she saw a man coming toward her. Not a word did he say but he put something in her hand. It was a snow globe.
The unknown man was the Angel of Death who handed her the key to the Land of the Dead – that key represented a part of the world of the living trapped in a snow globe, a part of a dear memory of the deceased. She stared at the snow globe and saw that the snow in it had stopped falling, and she was now looking at herself swinging on the swing as a child.
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