Chapter I: The Offer

I have finally been released from my room in the hospital. It's nice to finally be free of the aged white hospital room. Not to mention from being spoon-fed crappy hospital food by some buff nurse who looked like she could take out an MMA fighter. I was happy to be home and thankful for Canadian healthcare otherwise my mother would have been slapped with gigantic bills.

The hospital was not all that bad, it was made bearable because of my mother's frequent visits. She had not fared all that well over the last two years, her health had deteriorated and I was all she had left. It must have been a huge mental strain for me to have been in a coma for 4 months. I also found my doctor, Igor Williams, to be quite the character. Although he could be called imposing with an 195 centimetre (6 foot 5 for you americans) stature, a deep baritone voice, and an serious expression that seemed permanently plastered on his face, his actions were not. He always spoke politely with an air of sympathy interweaved into his words. He came to distract me from my inability to move with puzzles and conundrums, when he had the time. I also heard rumours from a certain MMA nurse that he would occasionally go some of the children's rooms and read them stories, with a smile on his face no less.

He seemed quite surprised with how fast I recovered from the shock of being paralyzed. So I told him my story.

It happened two years ago, I remember most of it clearly. I was scrounging up a midnight snack from the pantry. Tortilla chips with salsa to be exact. My mother came down to see what was making all the noise. I remember I talked to her for a bit, the words were inconsequential and forgotten. At some point we decided to sit out on the porch to stare at the stars on that clear summer night. The moon was a pale scythe, slicing through the cloudless black sky, and the stars were white blue sparks like scattered embers of a once great fire.

Then an explosion ripped apart the guise of a peaceful night. The moon was quickly masked by the black-grey smoke of the fire. Immediately I sprinted back into the burning house, and down the hallway to base of the stairs, the explosion had ignited the stairs.

I saw my father, little sister, and little brother trapped by the scarlet-orange flames at the top the stairs. My sixteen-year-old self was captivated by the angry flames and the fearful azure eyes of my three-year-old sister that begged me to save her from the relentless inferno. My mother, had to drag me out of the rapidly deteriorating building and I think she only managed on pure adrenaline. Never before have I felt so powerless.

By the time they were dragged out by the firefighters only Grace had survived. According to the firefighters my father, sister and brother had been forced into the second floor hallway by the flames. My Father had pushed his way through the inferno carrying my sister in blankets. After passing the blazing blanket which contained my sister through the window to the firefighter, the floor gave sending Falk and my father tumbling onto the floor below. My severely burned sister was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

One week later It did not get much better Grace was still alive in critical condition, but was not expected to survive much longer. My mother and I were "lucky" having only suffered minor burns. We also learned the the fire was most likely the result of arson. It was not unexpected as my father had been a lawyer, a damn good one at that. However, his job in general was an easy way to make enemies. The investigation got nowhere and no evidence of arson was found and as a result it was declared an accident.

Two weeks later my sister, despite the expectations, seemed to be getting better and was well enough for visits. Her once pristine skin, marbled with a shiny purplish red, her fair chestnut hair, tipped in a coal black, her azure eyes, vacant as if she was still trapped in that hallway on the second floor.

I visited her every day. Sometimes I read to her from a children's book, others I brought her animal plush toys, anything to return her to her usual careless cheer. What finally reached her was her old dog plush toy, a gift from dad, that had miraculously survived the fire. How ironic that the Fates decided to keep a plush toy safe in place of my father and brother. Unfortunately it seemed they were not content with two innocent lives.

One week later, a month after the fire, Grace died of complications.

I fell into depression, my mother managed to stay strong. She had always been strong, apparently strong enough for the both of us. She let me in on her secret;

"Graham, if the Fates ever push you down, get back up defy them with all you have and never, ever give up again. I’m pretty sure even the Fates will have to give up at some point if they can’t keep you down.”

It could not have been easy to raise a depressed sixteen-year-old as a single mother with only a high-school education. She had managed to find a job that made it barely possible to keep us in a two-room apartment. I never managed to figure out where she worked and what she did but she always came back tired. Even then she found time for me, she even made sure I attended school and was eating well, restricting her own meals to bare minimums or sometimes even skipping a meal altogether.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It took me one year to break out of my depression, one year to stand up again for the second time. I took on various part time jobs and began to take runs and train myself in the morning; I needed strength if I was to defy the fates. I put all my efforts into my studies as well. Every weekend I visited my family's grave and sat there speaking to them about the events of the week. I did not want them to feel as lonely as I had for that long year. I graduated top of my class with a full-scholarship to my local university. I could have probably made it into a higher profile university but I wanted to stay here to support my mother not mention the tuition would be beyond what we could possibly afford. The fates seemed to love their own sense of humour. They literally hit me with the accident the day after I graduated stripping me of all my hard work.

Igor listened silently, seemingly deep in thought over my words, considered it for a while, then he spoke;

"Graham," his rich voice began, you could here a bit of what I now knew to be a Ghanian accent in his words. "it seems you have been through quite a lot. I will not say I can understand what it is like, but if you need someone to talk to you can always talk to me. I know it is not much but it is all I can offer. Stay strong Graham I can see strength in your eyes."

To me, those words were enough. It was then I remembering my mothers words. I put them to heart and stood up again. How I would love to see the Fates expressions if I had some how managed that more than figuratively.

*****

“Hello Graham.”

A curt greeting spoken seemingly from nowhere; I would have jumped a meter in the air from surprise, had I been able to.

“Hello uncle. I certainly was not expecting you to pop out of thin air. How have you been?”

“Well although I can’t say I’ve fared the best I’m certainly in a better condition than you.”

“Knowing you, you would not come here unless you were doing more than checking up on my condition. Especially since you don’t seem capable of supporting mother even if you seem to be so busy doing something.”

I did not even attempt to hide the sarcasm that seeped it’s way into that last line.

“My work and your mother are completely different matters and you of all people should know that I can’t just go drop a check for 500,000$ into your mailbox and make everything better. If something bad happens I’ll step in, but it is in my personal policy that people should be as self-sufficient as possible in terms of livelihood.Though you are correct that checking your well being is not the only thing on my agenda.”

[Well no one saw that one coming.]

“So what is this so called ‘agenda’?”

“I’ve come with a proposition. One that even you can fulfil even in that condition. Well, rather than a proposition, a better term would be an offer…”

*****

I was released from hospital today 3 months after the pleasant ‘chat’ with my uncle. It took a while to heal some of the more serious wounds from the crash, even if I could not feel them and so in the end it took quite a while to return to my worn out house, a single floor house right beside a busy roadway. Not really what you could call “prime real estate” but it was the best we could manage after all that especially since the insurance we had at the time did not seem to cover “accidental ignition”.

However I loved it anyways after all it was the crystallization of my mother’s hard work.

Those 3 months gave me time to think. What was I going to do and how could I make money? How much money exactly? enough to create a comfortable life for my mother and myself.

I could not just get a simple job at a burger place or something like that. That is pretty damn hard without use of most of my body and it really does not give me enough money.

I had no ways of getting spinal repair surgery, especially since it’s still in it’s testing phase and I definitely had no way of getting my hands on limb augmenters. Limb augmenters are a new technology that reads information from the brain via the spinal column, or in my case what left of it functioned, and use that to control your limbs via an exoskeletal suit or internal implants. In other words it was a way to make my body move once again. However currently they were stupidly expensive because of the special battery needed to power it. Compact energy sources do not come cheap.

Online, sure there are plenty of jobs but I really am not all that good at that type of thing and would I type without use of my body.

[No matter how I look at I am backed into a corner. What am I going to do?… Hah, I hope I don’t regret this but it looks like I’m going to have to take uncle up on his offer.]

Chapter I - END