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Visit from the Past
Sarah Jang | Short fiction
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Walking across the emptied room, the young man slowly shifted his gaze from
one end of the room to the other. His entire life had been contained in this tiny
little compartment...at least until now. The hand-picked furniture, all the books,
the figurines over which he had poured painstaking hours constructing during his
boyhood days, all those memories! They had all been neatly stacked away into
boxes and taken away. Now all that was left was the mere skeleton. Without the
comforting assurance of being “his” that the room had possessed, it suddenly
felt...well, alien. He shivered.
"Ready, son?" Dad's arms tentatively wrapped around his shoulders in an
awkward gesture of affection. Eddie nodded and took a deep breath. His handsome
features were accentuated by a determined look, and he directed his gaze across the
street, where his new apartment--his new home--now stood. It was where he would
now live. Alone.
That had been 6 years ago.
The telephone rang, jolting him out of a restless sleep. Groaning from fatigue, he
desperately wished for anyone to turn the damn ringing off, before realizing for
the trillionth time that he was the only one in the house. In a fleeting moment of
rebellion, Eddie contemplated shirking his work. After all, who else but the hospital
would be calling at this ungodly hour? The place had more doctors and nurses
than one could imagine; one would think they could survive ten hours without
summoning a doctor who had just retired from finishing a series of surgeries. But
no. Sadly, that was work.
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