There are fluffies in this story. I promise.
At 8:43:15 AM, Alexander Knight opened his eyes. This is normally not something that is recorded down to the second. After all, tens of thousands of pairs of eyes are opening every second around the world. They’re waking up from a good night’s sleep, or a nap, or listening to music in quiet reverence, or playing peek-a-boo with a child. Most of these people’s eyes, however, haven’t been closed as long as Alexander Knight’s. When his eyes fluttered open, it had been over 4,000 days since they had closed. 4,116 if we’re going to be exact, which doctors usually are, so too shall we.
His eyes needed to adjust. Everything looked blurry, and his eyes swept the room lazily. He recognized a few things. He could see down his chest to his feet, covered by a blanket. This was new, as a sizable stomach had blocked the way before. He could hear the staccato noise of machinery, beeps and chirps randomly sounding. He could tell from the décor, the beeps, and the railings running perpendicular to his body that he was in a hospital. Alexander couldn’t recall why, though. He felt his thoughts swirling and running like cold syrup, his brain lazily picking through memories like a six-year-old pushing unwanted vegetables around the dinner plate. He was at home, last time he remembered.
Remembered. He stared up at the ceiling, thinking. His thoughts come slowly, but they do come to him. Despite how groggy he feels, whatever had happened to him, his memory was intact. Alexander Louis Knight, check. Wife, Rachel, check. Diana, daughter, age 15, check. He’s a doctor. Not a medical doctor, but someone with a doctorate. Biogenetics. He was a professor, he remembers. John Hopkins University. Veritas vos liberabit.
He mentally commanded his feet to move and was pleased to see the tiny movements of his big toe shifting under the blanket. He decided to try to speak. After what seemed like hours, he gathered up the strength and spoke his first words in 4,116 days.
“Hnnngnnmnmframmmmm,” he said what he hoped sounded triumphant, but really just sounded like someone with a mouthful of uncooked rice trying to ask for water.
A short time later, a nurse came in to check on him. As she looked over the monitors, he again eloquently mumbled out a dropped Scrabble’s game worth of random vowels and consonants. The nurse shrieked so loudly that the floor security guard came lumbering in, a shaved bear of a man who did not expect to be bothered with having to run today. The nurse pointed at Alexander, who turned his head very slightly from the nurse to the guard, who by this time was staring at Alexander and running a hand through thinning hair.
“Wow,” was all the guard said.
Doctors were called in and the room was filled soon enough with almost a dozen men and women in white coats. Alexander overheard words like “miracle” and “astonishing”. A woman with dark skin and darker hair spoke to the nurse who screamed earlier, asking to call the patient’s daughter. ‘Diana’, he thought to himself. He couldn’t wait to see his little girl Diana and wife, Rachel. The love of his life, the stars in his sky. He was tired. He was exhausted. The energy in the room left him feeling drained and he hope he mumbled “I’m going to take a nap now” before he closed his eyes.
When Alexander woke up (thankfully much sooner than the previous time he had closed his eyes), his doctor was standing over him. The dark-skinned woman he saw before, as it turned out, wasn’t just one of the tourists visiting the newly-awakened Alexander, but rather his doctor. Her name was Dr. Pritham, and she spoke with an English accent. She smiled at Alexander with the expression of someone out of practice trying to comfort people.
“Your daughter is flying in, Mr. Knight. She should be here first thing tomorrow.” Alexander nodded slightly. He tried to speak, and after several false starts, said in a low, raspy voice, “Can you … tell me h-how l- … -ong I was … out?” He spoke haltingly, picking through his brain for the right words and the strength to speak them aloud.
“I can. Your daughter, however, asked if we could wait until she is here to speak about that and more. I am sure you have a hundred questions, and I will answer them if you wish. You are my patient, after all, not her. It is up to you, however.” Dr. Pritham smiled that unpracticed smile. Her mouth made all the right movements to be considered a smile, eventually. She hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the eyes, though.
His room gave no hint to the date. A whiteboard had writing on it, including the date, but it was only the month and day. The math from that information alone showed him that it was possible he was out for almost 9 months. Amazing. Alexander was quiet for a half minute before nodding. “Let’s … wait.” Dr. Pritham gave him a curt nod and told him to rest up for now. Alexander happily obliged. He was happy about his daughter’s imminent arrival, but the way everything was playing out had him nervous. He slept a dreamless sleep.
Alexander was sitting up in bed, slowly and methodically being fed breakfast by a nurse when Dr. Pritham came in with a visitor. He wasn’t sure who she was, but she was looking at him nervously. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, short, with her hair in a braid. He knew this because it was over her shoulder, and her hands teased at it worryingly in a manner that was familiar to him. The pair sat down on chairs that were situated close to his bed as the nurse excused herself.
“Alexander. Do you know who this is?” Dr. Pritham said.
Alexander stared at the other woman. He shook his head, slowly.
“She looks…familiar. She’s…familiar. One of my students?”
The young woman gives a slight smile. “In a way. It’s me, Dad. It’s Diana.”
Alexander stared at her. The way she was playing with her hair, it was just like…it was. It was her. She was smiling at him and trying not to cry. She did look like one of his students. She wasn’t the 15-year-old girl he remembered, asking him questions every day about the work he did, the one he taught how to fish and read, the one he learned how to draw passably well because as a little girl she asked him to draw all sorts of animals on every blank piece of paper she could find.
“How long have I been out? I thought it was only… but look at you! You’re a grown-up!”
Diana said quietly, “Eleven years. You’ve been out for over 11 years, Dad. You fell, at home. It was a miracle, the doctors said. Slipped and fell in the kitchen, you hit your head. A quarter-inch in a different area, you would have been dead instantly. Instead you just…slept.”
Alexander stared ahead, but saw nothing. He spoke slowly. He felt stronger, physically and mentally, but now he felt like his body was made of lead.
“Over a decade. I…I missed all that? I missed you! Look at you, you’re…” He paused. “Where is your mother?”
Diana did cry, now. This was going to be the hardest part.
“She died, Dad. She died a few years ago. She was in a car accident. It was just a car accident. She kept visiting you until she died. She would read to you, talk to you. She played books on tape for you. The doctors couldn’t say if it would make a difference, but she figured it couldn’t hurt.”
The two of them cried together, while Dr. Pritham sat there, awkwardly. She missed her patient being in a coma. Much less crying in the room then.
After a great deal of catching up and much arguing back and forth, Diana acquiesced to going back to school. She was getting her master’s degree, and the semester was almost over. Alexander insisted, because as Dr. Pritham told them, he would be transferred to a rehabilitation facility for at least the next six weeks. His muscles had atrophied; the doctors had done their best, and he would regain full functionality, but it would take practice.
The rehab facility was a beautiful one, and the staff was nice, but it was also incredibly dull. A lot of his days revolved around exercising, at first small movements, and then larger. He graduated to walking, eventually, first just around the room, and then around the hall. He shuffled with a walker, and a nurse shadowing him. The days melted together. He spent his free time catching up on reading. He spoke to some colleagues on the phone, trying to figure out when (or if) he could go back to work.
He never much cared about the news. He flipped through the internet on a tablet, mostly reading up on journal articles he missed. He never was much for television, either, but the room had one. He left it on sometimes just for the noise. Nothing much changed in over a decade. The View was still on, various judges judged people in daytime television. Colorful cartoons still played, some of which he remembered from when Diana was younger. He noticed a new trend in this new decade; the trend to use brightly colored little horse-like animals in commercials, pretty often. They weren’t like a cereal mascot or bears hawking toilet paper, because they were on a number of different products. He saw the little CGI horse-things occasionally on shows, too. They could talk, in a saccharine-tinged voice that he wasn’t sure was adorable or annoying. Weird.
The time eventually came for Alexander Knight to leave the facility. He had regained most of his strength; he could open jars, open doors, walk a decent while without getting winded. He walked with a cane. He didn’t technically need it, but it made things easier, and truth be told, a part of him always wanted an excuse to have to use one. Oh, this cane? Antique, carved from the bone of a pilot whale. I have to use it because I was in a coma. Of course, the cane he had now was hospital-issued, but some day…
Diana was there to pick him up. She had finished, and taken a semester off.
“You know, I can bring the car around, Dad. I parked like a few blocks away.”
Alexander dismissively waved a hand, shaking his head. “I can walk that, all that and more! Besides, this will be the first time I’ve been able to walk somewhere that isn’t Stella Maris, even if it’s just a few blocks.”
They walked, catching up as they made their way slowly. They had plenty to catch up on, and the weather and grounds of Stella Maris were lovely. They were getting close to the car when Alexander heard what sounded like a child speaking to them.
“Hewwo! Nicest mistah and wady hab nummies for soon-mummah? Soon-mummah need bestest food for bestest soon-babies!”
Diana rolled her eyes. “Just ignore it and just keep walking, Dad. We’re almo-“
Diana stopped mid-sentence, looking back as she noticed her father was no longer keeping pace with her, the tap-tap of his cane silent. Instead, he stood bewildered, looking down at the creature, who by this time was at least smart enough to take a step back, looking worried.
“What the fuck is that!” Alexander sputtered.
The creature skittered back more. “Nyu wike bad wordsies! Fwuffy sowwy!”
Diana looked confused. “Dad, it’s just a…” She paused. He’d been out for over a decade. He had no idea what he was looking at. He missed…everything.
“It’s a fluffy, Dad. I’ll explain in the car.”
“How can you be so blasé! It’s one of the little CGI mascots that I kept seeing on television, but it’s real! A tiger on two legs just said how grrreat the cereal he was eating is, and you just say ‘Oh, yeah, that’s just a talking tiger’!”
By this time, the fluffy had waddled away, hiding in the bush it emerged from. A small trail of foul-smelling liquid gave its hiding space away. It watched the pair, shivering.
“Dad, yeah, like I said, that’s a fluffy, they sort of…exist. I can explain it all in the car.”
Alexander Louis Knight, professor of biogenetics, stared at the bush and the creature in it.
“It talked. It can talk. Can we…take it home?”
Diana groaned, the same “ughhh” of frustration that he remembered her using when he told her to clean her room. This was going to be a long day.
End of Chapter 1.
Author’s note: So, long-time lurker, first-time writer. I had to. The opening paragraph popped into my head about a week and a half ago, along with the subject of fluffies, and it refused to leave. It was nice to write something that wasn’t work or school related, though! It’s been a while.