Translucent (2 page)

“So then,” said the doctor as he entered the room. “Judging from the urgency of your call, there must be something rather
important happening, am I right?
”

Harold and Christi simply stared daggers at him, as he was simply stating the obvious, and after a moment of this the doctor realized what he should be doing.

“I apologize for my somewhat late arrival. I was preoccupied with something at the time you called, and I wasn’t able to come immediately. I hope
it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience
.”

The two Byrds merely stared at him again, without saying anything.

“What…uh…seems to be the problem
,
then
?” the doctor asked, deciding to skip all the pleasantries and go straight to business.

“
Our
11-month
old daughter can talk,
”
Harold said.

The doctor blinked and looked over at Karena,
lying in the crib at the wall. He looked back at the Byrds.
“Well, then you must have a very intelligent girl.”

“She wasn’t able to talk just 24 hours ago,” Christi explained. “And then all of a sudden she woke up in the middle of the night and started talking.”

The doctor looked baffled by the two people standing before him, claiming that their daughter seemed to have magically learned to speak over the course of a night.
“I’m sorry, but, I’m actually having a hard time believing your story,” he said. “As I’m sure is perfectly understandable, considering its incredibility.” He paused and, shifting uncomfortably, looked back over at Karena, who was lying awake in her crib, staring at the doctor. “
If this is indeed the case
,
which I highly doubt it is, mind you, c
ould she perhaps demonstrate?”

“I’m sure she will,” Harold said. “Though she’s reluctant to tell us about how this actually happened, so I doubt you’ll get any information out of her.”

The doctor gave Harold an incredulous glance at that statement, before going over to Karena’s crib and peering down at her.
It was awkward to have someone the size of a giant staring down at her in her crib, and she searched her mind for what she should do. She was tempted to talk to him to the way she had to her parents, but she quickly decided against it and developed a new plan. It would be better just to play dumb and act like she was a real baby. The more she got frustrated, the longer this dream was going to seem, so
she
immediately closed her eyes and pretended to fall asleep. She was fee
ling tired anyway, so it wasn’t
hard.

“Um…” the doctor was still hovering over her, clearly feeling
strange to be talking to be talking to a baby. Karena smiled inwardly. Despite how unsettling this dream was, she was finding this particul
ar part to be quite amusing.
In the morning, she told herself, she would be able to tell all her friends about the strange dream she’d had.
“Could you please…say something so that I can see…that you can…talk?” Through opening her tiny eyes a slit, Karena could see the doctor’s ruddy cheeks as he went red with embarrassment. Clearly this was something
doctors hadn’t been trained for, and it was all Karena could do to keep from smirking at the doctor’s unsureness.

The doctor turned around
abruptly after a moment
and looked back at the Byrds. “Well, clearly you are mistaken about your daughter having the ability to talk. She’s quite mute, and I’m sure you’ll be convinced of that in a few days’ time, despite ho
w realistic your dream might have been.”

“Dream!?” Harold exclaimed. “Believe me, this was no dream. I just spoke with her hours ago and both of us saw and heard her talking last night. She was thrashing about like crazy and banging her head on the side of the crib and doing all sorts of other disturbing things that no baby should ever be seen doing. I don’t think we would have both had the exact same dream at the exact same time, where the actions of one person in their dream were mirrored in the other’s dream. It’s impossible.”

The doctor gave a small smirk. “Well, Mr. Byrd. To be quite frank I think the prospect that an
11-month
old who could scarcely utter small words the day before can learn to speak fluent English overnight is less believable than the prospect of you both having
the same dream at the same time, especially since there is no proof that your daughter can actually do what you claim she can.
Perhaps-”

“No, I don’t want a ‘perhaps!’” Harold cried. “What I want is answers, doctor. I want to know what’s wrong with my daughter, and how it can be fixed, and, and…”

Harold couldn’t go on before breaking down in tears.
He stood up and walked over to Karena’s crib, looking down at his supposedly sleeping child. “Talk to me!” he yelled. “Please, I know you can do it, and I know you’re not really sleeping right now, so just talk to me! We can help you! I know you’re in shock right now, and I know you don’t want to communicate with us, but just TALK TO ME!!”

Harold
doubled over on the floor, as the doctor walked out the door, checking his watch to see how much time he’d just wasted with this crazy family.
He would mail the paycheck shortly.

Karena woke up from another long slumber and found herself still in the crib, in the nursery, in the body of a baby.

She had no idea how long it had been since she
’d woken up as a baby, but she
estimated that it
must have
been
at least
several day
s. As the hours ticked on and
she went through a strange cycle of sleeping and lying awake and being fed disgusting baby food
before falling asleep again
, a thought would sometimes come into her mind that she’d try to ignore. But time continued to go on, and on, and on, and nothing changed, and the fact that was popping into her mind more and more often was soon impossible not to realize.

This was no dream.

Though Karena knew it was true, she didn’t think about it, instead focusing on other things like trying to gain mobility in her chubby limbs so that she could be able to do more things like trying to find more ways to wake herself up. By making her believe that she was eventually
she was going to wake up, it gave her something to focus on, a mission that she was constantly working towards so that this could be over. But above all of this, there hung the sense of dread, that she was never going to wake up and that this was her new life, living as a baby, helpless and incompetent, until she would grow up and become a toddler, and then a child, and then a teenager, and then…

Karena quic
kly halted
her thoughts about what was in store for her in the future, and instead thought about her past. She remembered what she’d been doing the day that everything had disappeared and she’
d woken up like this.
Although it was only a couple days ago, it could have been eons to her.

Karena had been a pretty typical person for her age, you could say. She’d had long brown hair and
was quite tall, though not excessively. She had an average sort of face that takes a few times of seeing it before you can actually recognize it and say “Hey, that’s Karena.” She hadn’t been perfectly content, of course, as someone of the age of 15 is not likely to be extremely content, but she’d been content enough. She’d liked to laugh a lot, and she
’d
enjoyed going out with her friend
s when she was able. Above all, though, she’d been quite resilient to her circumstances. When something terrible had happened that had changed her life forever,
she had at first been devastated and was under a state of depression. But as the time went on, she became strong, not letting that event ruin her beyond all hope of recovery.
Just like she wasn’t going to let this dream ruin her.
Her resilience to terrible things was perhaps the most prominent feature of her character, and it became what had defined her to her friends.

She’d been with her friends
that day
,
the day she’d disappeared. I
t’d been a Saturday, and they were going to go out somewhere to eat. Her friend had asked her where she’d wanted to go for lunch, and she’d said she wanted to go to Quencher’s
,
a great local resta
urant that she’d went to from time to time
. They’d gone to Quencher’s and they’d walked inside and sat down. She’d noticed a strange man sitting at a table in the corner with a large hat that hid his face from view. She’d seen him, but not though
t
much of him, since she’d been busy talking and laughing with her friends.

The strange man
had
continued to sit there,
not moving a muscle. He hadn’t had
any food in front of him, or
even a
drink, just a blank table.
A
waitress
had come and taken
their order, and she’d decided to order the burger she usually got there. The strange man continued to sit there motionless, and Karena found him to
be harder and harder to ignore the more she sat there with her friends.
No one ever bothered him, and no waitress came to take his order, as if the restaurant was used to seeing him just sitting there with no apparent purpose in doing so.
The food came, and they started eating, laugh
ing and talking, but Karena had begu
n to feel a slight uneasiness with the man sitting in the back all the while.

Finally, Karena
had asked one of her friends: “Do you recognize that man back there?”

Her friend had looked where Karena had glanced. “What man?” she’d asked.

“The strange man sitting at the table in the corner, with the large hat,” Karena had replied. “He’s just been sitting here the whole time, not eating or drinking, just staring at the table in front of him.”

Karena’s friend had cast another subtle glance to the back of the room. “I don’t see anyone,” she’d said.

Karena had been confused for a moment, wondering why her friend hadn’t been able to see the man, but after a second’s contemplation she’d said, “Oh, whatever
,” with a shrug of her shoulder
s and they’d gone back to eating.

Karena had forgotten about the man for the time being, focusing
instead on things she deemed more
important, until the man did something that forced her attention to be drawn
back
to him. He raised his head and looked in her direction, before taking off his hat and revealing his face.

Karena had turned around so that she was completely facing him.
His face had been
ordinary enough, she
’d
supposed. He
’d
looked to be in the mid-forties, with an average complexion and average facial features.
But it was his expression that
’d
really go
t
t
en
to her. He hadn’t been
smiling, nor frowning, simply staring with cold, piercing eyes directly at her.

Karena’s heart had begun to beat wildly, and again she’d turned to her friend. “That man is staring right at me,” she’d said. “And it’s kind of freaking me out.
”

Once again, Karena’
s friend hadn’t been
able to see the man.
She’d asked
the others at the table
, but they merely laughed at her, thinking it was strange that she thought there was someone back there. And yet
Karena had been
growing increasingly worried that something was going to happen,
al
though it was somewhat hard to explain why.

And then the man
had reached into one of the inner pockets in his long overcoat, and had pull
ed out a small item, which
Karena had a hard time seeing at first. But with a closer look, she was able to make out that it was a small hourglass, about 8 inches high and
3 inches wide, with all the sand
at the very bottom except for a tiny bit that was at the top and was in the process of falling to the bottom.
The glass was translucent, so that the sand behind it was somewhat blurry and hard to make out.

The man had reached out one of his fingers and given three small taps on the hourglass, staring directly into her eyes the whole time. In the moment, Karena had felt a sudden feeling of dread,
stronger than she ever had before,
and all the noise in the restaurant had faded away except for the small tapping of the man’s finger
nail
on the glass.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

And then the sand had run out, and everything had disappeared. The table, her friends, the restaurant, the man, it all vanished in the blink of an eye and sh
e was floating through darkness, with a faint
, almost unnoticeable
violet color somewhere in the background.

And then she’d woken up, and she’d found herself lying in the dark, helpless, and she’
d begun crying. The s
hock of suddenly
waking up in a new place, with a new body, had left her panicked, and she’d hardly been able to breathe thro
ugh her wailing and screaming.

Then her dad had come in, and after a minute he’d turned on the light, and then she saw him. Standing behind her dad was the very same man who’d been in the restaurant just moments before, with the overcoat and hat. He’d taken off the hat and stared at her, and though he’d looked a little older then, it’d been the exact same stare that he’d given her in the restaurant, with the same cold, menacing eyes and featureless face.

The man had taken out his hourglass from his pocket, and this time the sand was all at the top. He’d lifted his finger and tapped the hourglass three times.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

And then the man had vanished, leaving Karena in
too great a state of shock for her to comprehend.