This choice: You go and see your great-grandmother • Go Back...Chapter #3You go and see your great-grandmother by: Clockworange   Using your mother's maiden name seems to do the trick. The doctor's eyes flash in recognition. Flipping a page on his clipboard, his mustache bristles. "I see. Mittle. You must be here to visit Ethel, then?"
You have no idea where you are (aside from a hospital wing, apparently), the name of any of the doctors, nurses, and patients walking about, or most importantly why you're suddenly in your mother's younger body. You strongly suspect you're in the past, sometime in the 1980s given your mother's youthful appearance and the fashion worn by everyone around here. Doc Martens, parachute pants, and big foofy hair not being popular since then. You know your Mom and Dad buried some of those relics way, way back in the closet at home for nostalgia.
Nodding silently, feeling your mother's curly hair bounce about your shoulders, you stand up unsteadily. Swaying for a moment, you resist the urge to grab your new hefty, perky breasts and follow the doctor down the hallway. You hear your mom's pumps clicking smartly on the tile until you stop in front of a patient room.
"She's awake now." The doctor announced, adding gently, "It's good that you came, Sarah. Please, take as much time as you need." He turned the doorknob and beckoned you inside.
Oxygen tanks. The rhythmic humming of a respirator as it compresses and decompresses. Intravenous tubes, needles, and packets dangling from a rack behind the bed. A box television set, currently turned on, with wire antennae and dial knobs in the corner of the smallish room. The whole room smells like anti-septic. The curtains are partly drawn, and the lamp next to the bed emits a milky yellow light, even though it still looks like daytime outside.
Laying in bed: A small old woman with pale skin and a few patches of curly white hair sitting atop her head. The hospital blankets are thick and warm and lay heavily on top of her skeleton-like body, which is dressed in a drab green gown with polka dots.
You approached the woman, not knowing what to say or even who she was, wondering whether this was all a dream and you might wake up in your own bed, in your own body, back in the present day.
And then you saw the flowers.
There they were: Purple Lilacs, in a vase on the table on the other side of the bed next to the window.
You never met Ethel Mittle; she died before you were born. Everything you knew about your maternal great-grandmother, therefore, came from stories passed down from your mother, which wasn't very much. The only time Grandma Ethel was ever mentioned was during family reunions along with a spate of other names you hardly recognised. You remember her appearing in slideshows and the occasional homemade film reel, but she was always in the background, never the centre of attention it seemed.
But one thing stood out more than anything else was how much she loved lilacs. She and her husband, that's your great-grandfather Dean, always had a fresh crop of lilac flowers in their old house. Ethel loved them, and Dean loved Ethel, so they never went without them according to your mother. Even most of Ethel's clothes had the same light purple colour, although most of her photos in the family scrapbook were black-and-white. Their old house was about three hours' drive away, where Ethel grew a whole patch of lilacs in the garden.
So the lilacs resting in the vase made perfect sense to you now. You confirmed that this woman was, in fact, your great-grandmother, by viewing the notes scribbled with an erasable marker on a whiteboard on the wall. Her name, medications, Nurse's name, and surgical schedule were listed neatly on the whiteboard.
Along with today's date: 14 September, 1988.
Bloody hell! That would make your mom 20 years old.
You aren't sure whether she met Dad by this time, hoping to awaken from this hyper-realistic dream before knowing for sure.
This whole time, Ethel hadn't noticed you enter the room. She was watching a news programme on the TV. The production quality is terrible, and you swear the news anchor referred to the Soviet Union a moment ago:
In response to reported political instability in Soviet-bloc countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, General Secretary Gorbachev will be unveiling a new policy entitled glasnost, Russian for 'openness.' The response from the United Nations has been mostly positive, viewed by many as another step towards...
Your mouth feels dry, and your heart is thumping within your chest. What do you say to an old woman you've never met before? A woman who you know is about to die?
You're not particularly religious, but you can't shake the feeling that there's something meaningful about this whole situation. Like, maybe God or Jesus or somebody else placed you here for a reason? If this is all just a dream, it's certainly the most vivid dream you've ever had. Right down to the empty feeling in your crotch down below!
You continue pretending to be Sarah, Ethel's granddaughter. Reasoning that she, like anyone else, wouldn't understand why a 20-year-old woman would suddenly claim to be her own 19-year-old son!
How does the conversation go?
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