Coccoon in heated bedsheets at the centre of all these wires and pipes, you must look like a fly in a spiderweb already sucked dry. Your hands lie still on the sheets, bone-white and bone-thin.
You faze in and out of consciousness, lured to sleep by the repetitive noise of your new, pneumatic lungs that sit beside the bed. Each time you claw yourself back awake - if Death is coming for you, you'll be damned if he catches you asleep. Only a few more months and the research will be complete, the scientists under your employ will know the exact combination of drugs necessary to repair a severed spinal cord, and tou'll be out of this body and into a brand new one. Well, not brand new. Second-hand, so to speak, but good enough.
As your eyelids flutter open, a dark figure looms over the bed side and in the minute it takes your good eye to focus on it you think this is it. It isn't the Grim Reaper, it's worse. Your grandaughter smiles down at you.
Your eyes widen. The heart monitor trills in alarm. Where are the nurses?! Where are the doctors?!
"Hello, grandfather," she smiles warmly. "How are you feeling?"
"I felt...fantastic...until...you...got....here." you reply, trying to inject relaxed confidence into the dedicated rasp of your voice. Never let them see you bleed. That was the first thing father ever taught you.
Unfortunately for that idiom, your grandaughter glances around for somewhere to park herself. She notices a bundle of cables to the right of the bed trailing over the top of the resus trolley. Her face lights up and with a wiggle of her shapely rear, she sits herself down on the trolley, her weight stretching the cables taught. You don't feel it, but a number of them pop out of a few of your major veins, which begin to leak dark blood.
Making herself comfortable, she leans forward with her chin resting on her hands, peering at you eagerly through her rather severe spectacles. She wears a light grey suit with a tight, pencil skirt. At first glance, business attire. At second glance, funereal. With her hair pulled back in a bun, you always thought she looked like a slightly chubby dominatrix, though of course you never told her that. Preferring instead to call her a fat slut.
"It took a lot of money to get in here, so try not to die too fast," she says sternly.
"You'll never... see a penny..."
"It was never about the money. I just wanted you to suffer," she replies, pulling a few more pipes out. She really was a nasty little pscho. If she wasn't your grandaughter, you would have married her years ago.
An hour later...
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