As consciousness settled upon her, Donella was vaguely aware of a strange sensation, like being underwater. Her skin felt cold, yet dry. There was an oppressive heaviness that weighed down on her entire body; she felt like she was thousands of feet below the ocean. Her chest hurt to breathe and she couldn't move her limbs. Donella's eyes snapped open in a panic as an icy horror filled her as darkness surrounded—was she really submersed? Slowly her eyes adjusted to her surroundings and she saw that she was in a very dark room. The only light came from a single candle, which seemed a million miles away, on a bedside table. A lone chair stood on the opposite side the table and it held a solitary figure. She seemed a grandmotherly sort although Donella couldn't see her face, well in the low light. The old lady saw Donella's eyes open and she walked over to her. Donella still couldn't turn her head so the old woman gently placed her hand behind Donella's neck, raised it forward, and brought a pewter cup to her mouth. Donella had no idea what it was but it tasted like some sort of sweet nectar; it was thick yet delicious, and she wanted nothing more than to drain that cup, but the woman pulled it away.
"Not so fast, you're still weak," the grandmotherly nurse said, "you rest now, and I will feed you more later."
She had an accent that Donella couldn't place but it sounded like she came from some Eastern European country. The woman brushed her soft wrinkled hands over Donella's forehead in a manner that reminded her of when she got sick as a child and her own grandmother would take care of her. As the nourishment from the cup worked its way through Donella's body, the dense weight that held her limbs abated somewhat, but she was still so fatigued that she soon drifted off into fitful unconsciousness.
Soon Donella was thinking about the past because she had no strength to fight off the painful memories that assaulted her. She missed her grandmother greatly; she had died last year and left Donella on her own. Donella had lived with her since the time she was eight years old, after her mother disappeared and her father went to jail. Donella had heard years later, after her mother had died, that she was living on the streets at that time. She was a lost soul, her whole life was consumed to her addiction of heroin. It shackled her to her fate. As for Donella's father, last she had heard he was locked away in San Quentin prison for murder, after sentencing she hadn't heard from him.
The murder he had committed Donella actually had witnessed. She couldn't remember how old she was but she was having a sleep over with a friend of hers. They were asleep in the living room of Donella's father's house in a run down section of East LA. Her father was a drug dealer and he had always had unsavory types of people in and out at all hours. Donella awoke to the sound of a loud argument coming from the den, which was just off the living room. She saw her father yelling at a Mexican man with one deformed arm. She had seen this man in the house before because her father told her not to stare at his arm, which looked like it stopped growing when he was a little boy. The man yelled back and her father pulled a knife out and stabbed him in the chest. The deformed man's friends tried to pull him out of the house to get him away from her father, but they weren't fast enough. There, Donella's father slaughtered that man, where she numbly sat watching. The deformed man's friends ran and soon the cops were at the house. They led Donella's father away and took her to live with her grandmother.
After that, she had led a relatively normal life. Her grandmother sent her to Catholic school where she spent most of her time taking art classes. After she graduated high school, she went to a nearby community college to get her associates degree in fine arts. Donella had planned on opening her own studio one day or possibly teaching if that didn't pan out.
There, at the school, she had met Tony. He was a playwright and a horrible one to boot, but love is blind and Donella fell hard. After a year and a half, he came to the realization they were "just too different" (translation: It's not me, it's you) and decided to go their separate ways. Tony, didn't have much trouble with the words, "too different" in this case, it had meant, I have a penis, you do not. This was the first and only man Donella had loved and honestly thought that, even though they argued a lot, that they would marry and have a family with a white picket fenced house in suburbia. Now as she lay in this foreign place, she tried to picture her life as a soccer mom, wearing Keds and denim jumpers, and couldn't grasp it. What had happened last night?
The memory of the ceremony came back then. She again tried to open her eyes and look about, and found that the grandmotherly woman was still there, sitting in the chair near the bed.
"Where am I?"
"You need sleep, you are still so weak," the elderly nurse told her.
Donella tried to sit up, her head spun, and she felt like she was going to be sick. A dull throb started in her skull and her vision started to black out. She limped to Donella's side and put a surprisingly strong arm around her. She might have seemed old but she possessed more than enough strength to hold up Donella's weight. She propped her up against the headboard when it was obvious that Donella wasn't going lie back down.
