‘I wish I were sucked into this book…’

A faint semblance of last-recalled thought lingered in Maya’s mind. Like continuing on a long-lost train of thought, it no longer made sense.

‘What was it about, again?’

The familiar hospital smell and the drowsiness from dozing off while reading were nothing out of the ordinary in Maya’s daily life. However, confusion struck her when she opened her eyes to find herself lying in a hospital bed.

‘Wait, this is wrong.’

But she didn’t get the chance to rebel as memory-filled dreams pulled her back under.

Images began to flash before her eyes. She found herself in the back seat of a car, with sunlight cutting through the dusty air. Her mother turned to look at her, a loving smile gracing her face, her hazel eyes mirroring Maya’s own reflection. Emotions surged within her, bringing with them a profound sense of dissonance.

‘Where was this longing coming from?’

A fleeting glance at her father in the driver’s seat momentarily diverted her attention. His furrowed brow betrayed his struggle with the glaring sunlight, which made it difficult for him to navigate the road.

Her focus returned to her mother, meaning to ask something.

What was she going to ask?

Suddenly, her father made a sharp turn and lost control of the car.

What caused his reaction, she couldn’t see, being too short to see over the dashboard. The next moment, she felt her insides churning and watched a smile wash away from her mother’s face, replaced by a terrified expression. Her brown curls lost their friendly shine and rose over her head in an unsettling way.

It was the last thing she saw before squeezing her eyes shut, unable to confront the harrowing scene unfolding before her. Yet, the sounds of the crash lingered—the screeching of tires, the scraping of metal, and the dreadful crunching, all mingled with her mother’s piercing scream, echoing and overlapping in her mind.

After the horror, silence was relieving.

This was not the right memory…

This cannot be the reason she’s in the hospital right now. This Maya was older than the kid in the back seat of that car. This Maya has gotten over her mother’s death. She had to, because this year, she needed to make room for mourning her father.

Returning to lucidity, Maya began to piece together that this incident had nothing to do with her current state. She was twelve when she lost her mother. Flashing memories of her mother’s face as she last saw her shook her tremendously. Unable to recall her face for a while now, this sudden resurfacing of repressed memories hit her with a new realization.

‘I look just like her.’

A sudden gasp in the room surprised her, and her gaze met a face she did not expect.

‘Anna?’

While Maya was still lingering in her sorrow, her stepmother walked into the room, completely unnoticed by Maya. It was her worried expression that somehow didn’t suit her beautiful young face—a worry directed at Maya.

Anna was at her side in an instant, wiping the tears off Maya’s cheeks and pushing the button to call for the nurse. “Maya, sweetie… Y—you’re awake…”

She was choking on her words while Maya was surprised by an arrangement of emotions she never thought her stepmother’s face could make.

‘Was… was she crying?’

Maya opened her mouth, but only incoherent sounds escaped her aching, dry throat.

“Don’t speak, sweetie,” Anna said, her voice filled with concern. “Your throat must be sore. Here, drink this, slowly.”

Anna handed her a glass with a straw. Maya, presented with no other option than to accept the help, took a sip. It was tepid water, but it eased the dryness of her throat.

Maya’s surprise at her stepmother’s reaction stemmed from her long-held belief that Anna didn’t genuinely care for her. The significant age gap between Anna and Maya’s father, coupled with their comfortable financial status, had led Maya to view Anna as a gold digger—a poor substitute for her mother whom she could never truly accept.

However, what worried Maya at the moment was that she had no recollection of how she ended up in the hospital.

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‘Dad…’

Soon, a nurse arrived and following her was a doctor. They gave her a quick check-up with Anna present; checking her pupils’ response, and her vitals on the monitor, while asking preliminary questions. Maya answered to the best of her ability as it was still hard to control her voice.

The nurse’s eyes scanned Maya. “Are you aching anywhere?”

“My right arm feels a little numb.” It was an understatement, as she felt a throbbing, pulsating pain coursing through her entire right side, but it was mostly predominant in her right arm.

Maya was patient while they did a check-up on her, trying to catch clues about her condition. Perhaps it was unnecessary to feel embarrassed about it, but Maya was reluctant to ask. Only answering their questions with vague answers.

Maya knew something was wrong with her, but she couldn’t figure out what. She had a lingering feeling that there was something she needed to do. Or rather, something she didn’t get a chance to do.

“Hmm…” The doctor pondered, rubbing his chin. “Your condition seems fine, impeccable even, considering…”

Maya leaned in curiously, but the doctor didn’t elaborate. Instead, he began summarizing her check-up results. Realizing there was no way around it, Maya knew she had to ask directly.

“Um, could you… could you tell me what happened?” Maya’s voice trembled, barely above a whisper.

The room fell silent. Seeing only confusion and trepidation on Maya’s face, slowly, it began to dawn on them. The doctor’s brow furrowed, the nurse’s eyes widened, and Anna’s lips parted in a silent gasp. It was clear that Maya’s apparent memory loss had caught them all off guard.

“Oh, you don’t remember?” the nurse spoke first.

“Am I dying?”

“No. Heavens, no. You’re in perfect condition, miraculously so. It’s just… How do we break it to you? It is rare, but it happens…”

“You are a rare survivor of being struck by lightning.”

“L—lightning!?”

“Do you remember anything?” Anna stepped in, hoping she could reassure Maya.

“Um, no, I don’t…” Maya didn’t know what to say.

While they were explaining to her something as fantastical as being struck by lightning, she stared at them in blank disbelief.

‘When did this happen?’

Although she felt pangs of pain in her body that proved their words to be true, Maya felt as if she wasn’t there when it happened at all. It was a strange feeling of having lost time, or, returning from a long past she couldn’t remember.

‘Is this how amnesiacs feel?’

They informed her the root-like markings left on her skin were called Lichtenberg figures and would soon fade away completely. In addition to everything, she learned that she had spent the past four days in a coma after getting into cardiac arrest and nearly dying on her way to the hospital. Doctors were baffled about what caused it because the lightning that struck her didn’t touch her heart or any vitals. All in all, what happened to her was nothing short of a miracle.

“Your burns are most concentrated on your right arm and your right side,” the doctor said. “Almost like you reached for the lightning yourself…”

“I reached for it?!”

“Oh, no. It is just my silly theory. We don’t know what you were doing.”

“Even stranger so, because I don’t remember it even being stormy in the area recently,” the nurse chimed in.

“Am I fine now?”

“You seem to be,” the doctor smiled, offering reassurance. “We'll keep you for monitoring overnight, if everything turns out fine, you’ll be discharged. You can go brag to your friends about those skin markings before they are gone completely.”

‘Friends, huh?’

After there was only Anna left with her in the room, Maya decided to shake off her sense of derealization and asked for more details.

“You really don’t know what happened?”

The truth was, Maya couldn’t determine the last thing she remembered clearly. She couldn’t remember anything solid for days, even weeks prior. However, she knew the reason was that there just wasn’t anything worth remembering.

Even now, though something eventful like this happened, in reality, it meant little in her life. It was almost like a silly interlude in her depressing reality. There was no need to become a part of another story; her life was already a tragedy.

Maya was a sixteen-year-old who knew nothing but depression. For the past couple of years, she has lived in endless worlds of books she has never physically touched, all through a Kindle device. It was a gift from her father that kept her company all those years.

It didn’t always use to be this way. When her mother was still alive, they shared a love of books. Her mother preferred reading on paper, claiming that the physical act of flipping the page and the smell of printed paper reminded her to return to reality.

But Maya’s reality was that she was now an orphan. She didn’t lose both of her parents in that tragic accident, but it was almost as if she did.

The reason she was so used to spending time in the hospital was that her father had been in a coma there for a long time, and Maya would visit him every day. She was almost a resident, arriving right after school and leaving long after visiting hours ended. The hospital staff pitied her since her comatose father was the only family she had left.

Maya barely listened to Anna’s explanation, occupied by her miserable mind.

“You were just in the backyard. And all of a sudden, everything was white. A blinding flash with a loud thunder burned all the electronics in our house. I frantically ran downstairs to find you just walking back in like nothing had happened. You said something incoherent about how you must see someone before you buckled to the floor. I was so afraid, Maya. Don’t ever do anything like that to me again.”

Maya could see that Anna’s worry was genuine, and for some reason, even though she didn’t consider her completely heartless, she was a little surprised.

“See who?”

“I don't know, sweetie. You weren’t making any sense.”

‘Was I walking and talking right after the incident? Why do I not have any recollection?’