All My Life by Your Side

by Claudio Hernández

  - "Goodbye," she whispered at last.

  19

  Year 2006

  Laura Returns To Madrid

  She woke up at the Rafael Mendez Hospital built in 1990, but which Laura never saw. When she opened her celestial eyes, the sunlight blinded her for a moment, then came the thick fog, and finally, she saw the faces of the two nurses who stooped over her.

  - "Are you all right, Mrs. Laura?" -Asked one of the nurses with a big blond hair and a round face. Her eyes were grey, and she remembered something.

  - "You were about to die," -said the other dark-haired, and plump nurse as she prepares a syringe.

  - "But it's all over," -the blonde nurse explained.

  Laura shook her head slightly. Everything was spinning, but she was fine. Something maybe sedated, but for a moment she did not remember anything and felt good.

  - "Laura. You gave me a fright," -said a familiar voice in the haze of her eyes.

  It was Eva who, with a serious countenance, took her hand and squeezed it tightly. Laura closed her eyes and began to remember. Now another familiar voice made her fatigued, unlit eyes open again. It was Ana who had come from Madrid to take care of her again, in Madrid.

  - "Grandma, you're going to go with me to Madrid. I have come to pick you up and take you away from suffering."

  Laura nodded, and everything clouded again.

  20

  Year 2017

  All Life On Your Side,

  The Bottle With The Letter

  Laura lived until 2017 in Madrid and finally decided that it was time to return to her hometown to die, in Aguilas. Laura was going to be one hundred and three in September. In the year 2010 Eva died of sudden death. She learned from her granddaughter Anna, who was already old and had grandchildren. What would happen to Laura now? Ana decided that the best thing was that if she had chosen to return to Aguilas, to do so by entering the Railway Residence. There she would spend her last days in company with nobody, because all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren had left Aguilas in search of new destinations in France, Germany or Great Britain. One of them emigrated to the United States in pursuit of success, was a writer and Laura no longer remembered his name. The contact was minimal in the last twelve years, and nothing was left of them, but memories of their names and their vague faces that now seemed a reflection in a mirror.

  So, on the first day of January 2017, Ana took her grandmother to Aguilas. The paperwork to enter the nursing home was fast because Pedro was the worker of the Railway Garage, had all the rights to occupy that small house attached to one side of the long and wide hall where dozens of couples of seniors lived as if they were individual apartments. That would be her retirement. But even though she could hardly move, much less walk, Laura wanted to make one last wish come true.

  To visit the Amarilla Beach that was behind the Cocedores Beach in the Hornillo. She wanted to see if the green bottle was still there or the stream had been carried it away. She wanted to remember the things she did there when she was a cheerful young woman, well ahead of her time.

  But that could not be done that January that snowed for the first time in Aguilas in a centenary. She wrote a new letter with her bony fingers and a blue ink pen and waited for it to be good weather. Ana said goodbye to her, two days later, on January 3 and that was the last time she saw her.

  Laura. I am Laura, a girl in the body of a centenarian, a young woman who had planned everything and that life smiled from the beginning until she said that it was time to end so much happiness. Love was escaping through the window and sickness was coming through the big door. Then, I met her, and it was wonderful. I discovered that I could love a woman, even more than my husband. It was a rewarding experience, but the course of life was diverted as the look of a strange and tall man, who looks at you with dark eyes and points you. Then, life gives you a spin. It fills you with ups and downs, more downs than ups and makes you feel the fear, the horror, the suffering. But death does not come for you, but for your loved ones. Life fights death and leaves you there, alive, so that you can see suffering in all its extension. My heart could have exploded like a time bomb, but it did not. After overcoming the damn disease, I now remember fondly, yes, because it brought good things into my life. Mixed feelings. And some real tears. I encountered a fractured life and my body resisting the passage of time, like a stake nailed to the ground. A strong force cried like a pigeon cries. And now I am here, remembering, analyzing what I did wrong in my life.

  And a voice that came from the loudspeakers announced the dinner ...

  That happened on the tenth of January.

  In the month of May, with the help of a nurse and sitting in a wheelchair, she made her last wish come true before death stalked her.

  - "Do you know where Amarilla Beach is?" -Laura asked as she felt the clattering on her behind of chair big wheels.

  The blonde nurse, with a haircut to the shoulders, with her resplendent smile said.

  - "Yes, of course." She pointed with her index finger to a newly paved road, located below where the caves were before, and which now occupied a luxuriant yellow development. It's right on that little road.

  - "How much has changed." -Laura's voice was trembling, and she was pointing to the urbanization built up on the mountain.

  - "It's been a long time, Mrs. Laura since you lived here."

  Laura had told her along the way, that she had lived in the Hornillo caves.

  - "The rocks are gone."

  - "Of course, they've rebuilt this whole place," -the soft voice of the nurse cut her off, who was pushing the wheelchair. The nurse was corpulent, and her ass looked like a cushion when she walked.

  - "As a young girl, I jumped a few stones to get to the Amarilla beach," -Laura said, her eyes wide. This time they shone, and the rays of the sun that morning gave her beauty, even though those blue eyes were more than a century, during which they glittered and extinguished at different moments of his life.

  - "Now you'll only have to endure the tremor of the wheelchair," -the nurse boasted, smiling at her.

  Laura smiled dryly. Her lips were stretched out to break. She moved her hand back at the height of her head to reach for the hand of the nurse who was holding one of the rubber pieces of the chair and reached it. Her wrinkled, striated fingers caressed the back of the nurse's hand, and her eyes tear up.

  - "This was when I did something at a point in my life that marked my destiny forever," -Laura explained, stroking her hand.

  - "I can imagine." -The nurse was still pushing the wheelchair that trembled like the sound of a doorbell. She stepped onto the path and kept pushing.

  Before Laura's eyes who smiled again, the sea rose and its gentle waves with a distinctive scent that filled Laura with memories. The tires of the wheels of the chair slid over the road, and the sea grew larger and larger and the sand.

  - "Oh! Look." -The sand is just as yellow as it was then." -She pointed to Laura's crooked forefinger. - "All these years have remained the same."

  - "There are things that never change, Mrs. Laura."

  Laura laughed this time. A loud laugh in the absence of any cough. Now she put her hand to her mouth and with the back of it wiped the lips that he thought were wet.

  - "Can you take me to the end, Miss?" -Laura was restless in the wheelchair, and her eyes with tears.

  - "Of course, I can," the nurse said, pushing harder into the wheelchair that sank into the crushed sand.

  At the end of the beach, there were rocks. The same as always, where the waves broke in a soft hiss and gave off a smell of algae and saltpeter. As she always had done, and suddenly something shone before her eyes.

  - "What is it that shines among the rocks?"—Laura pointed out once more.

  "Now we'll check it." -The nurse stopped pushing the wheelchair and walked toward that glow on the rocks, lifting yellow sand with her clogs as if she were skidding at every step. Once in the distance of no more than thirty meters and with her feet in th
e water, the nurse raised what shone and said loudly.

  - "It's a bottle!"

  Laura's heart fluttered, and she put her hands to her chest.

  - "There's something inside," -the nurse said, trying to open the bottle. It had a blackened cork stopper.

  - "Can you approach it?"

  - "Of course."

  The nurse came out of the water and came back with the bottle in her hand. It was a greenish color and had lost the soft touch that now was rough glass. And indeed, there was something inside.

  - "Can you open it?"

  - "Of course! right now."

  It cost her a moment, but at the end, the cork yield to pressure into her brutal strength and agility.

  - "It's a very old paper," -said the nurse, as she turned the bottle upside down and inserted a finger into the mouth of the bottle. - "I cannot get it out."

  - "Well, break the bottle," -Laura said expectantly and with some strange sensations in her body, which she had felt on more than one occasion.

  The nurse retreated to a rock to her right and hit the bottle against the rock. The jingling of crystals sounded above the waves, and the pieces of green glass shone in different forms under the rays of the sun. The nurse took the paper and unscrewed it.

  - "It's a letter," -she said back to Laura.

  - "Can you read it please?" -Laura was that almost got up from the wheelchair because she suspects what was about this letter.

  The nurse frowned and started to read...

  My name is Laura, and I am sixteen, and no, I will not tell my hardships, thank God, I do not have them. I will not mention battles with my friends because that would be something timeless. Well, something that disappears with time when we each chose our path and then we did not even greet each other when we encountered. What I want to write or explain is something that belongs to my future. It's a decision of mine, a fervent desire that has me obsessed, but I think it's normal for any girl my age.

  Laura's crying interrupted the reading of the letter. The nurse stroked his wrinkled face and told her.

  - "This means something to you, does it?"

  - "It's my letter that I wrote at the age of sixteen. It has always been there, waiting and life has played me."

  - "How beautiful is this story," -the nurse said in a whisper.

  - "You do not know how beautiful and devious you are." -Laura burst into tears and added. - "Goodbye, I love you, my love."

  She was referring to all her lovers that had passed through her life, and she had to witnessed die against her will, written in that letter, and she understood how much despicable this life was and the love.

  And she lived five years more ...

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I grew up and started writing upon being heavily influenced by the master of terror and drama, Stephen King. I am the author of his first biography as a writer. Furthermore, I have written an anthology based on a box that I had found that allegedly belonged to his father, who was also a writer. Now, I have dedicated my time to writing books of terror, suspense, and thrillers. In Amazon, I have already published my books, ‘The Beginnings of Stephen King’, ‘Stephen King’s Box’, ‘Tom’s Story’, ‘Infected’ a saga about zombies, ‘Midnight Fear’, ‘All Your Life at Your Side,’ ‘Arnie’, ‘Truck cemetery’, ‘Seven Books, Seven Sins’, ‘Bonmati’s House’, and ‘The guardian of the castle’, but these are not the only ones that I intend to publish this year.

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