Hush

Hush



A little girl gets up to use the restroom. A sick, aching little girl. She drags her ailing body down the hallway and into the girls' restroom, heaving the door shut behind her. She will remember the pain that she has been experiencing when the time comes to remember everything. The girl stands up slowly and pulls the cord above the toilet, straining up to it. She turns at the small, whimpering sound behind her. There is someone... something curled up in the corner of the bathroom, weeping. She is afraid, and confused in the dreary of night, but she goes over to the human-like figure trembling there. Her own voice is loud in her phlegm-clogged ears as she asks what is the trouble.

A pale-white face... distorted and crumpled creaks on the long, spindly neck over to stare with empty eyes at the small, sick girl. She is frightened of the monster, too petrified to move.

“You are dying.” The creature says in a raspy, wind-like voice. His mouth doesn't move correctly, as if the joints are all askew inside his face. The little girl can't make a squeak, but shakes her head no, fearfully.  The creature stands from the floor. His body is just as contorted and disfigured as his awful face. He takes hold of both her hands, a broken smile cracking his face. He pulls her back to her bed, the girl stiff as a plank, unable to scream or resist. When she is there, she lies back against the mattress and stares wide-eyed up at the broken, wrong man. His smile is still wearing his face like a skin coat, seeming the only thing on his body with normalcy. He bends down ever so slowly, closer and closer to her face. Tears run down the sides of the scared child's face as he reaches out for her throat.

She coughs. She struggles for air against a rush of attacking phlegm rushing into her throat and lungs. She never had the presence of mind to savor her last breath of air.





It is late at night, the hall lights have long since been turned out. Mr. Mark Hush, a gentle man cresting thirty-five years old, hunched over adoption papers under the flame of a blistering lantern at his desk. His ears perk up to a meek, cold voice spilling from the door to the dark hallway.

“Sir?” Spiderwebs of moonlight gush over the peaks of his shoulders and fall to the surface of his desk. He peers over the rim of his glasses to find a small girl clasping the door frame to his office.

“Who is it, there?” He calls back, squinting.

“Lilly.” She whispers like whistles of wind into the room.

“Lilly? Come in, Child. You are out of bed! I am quite surprised. What has you troubled this late at night?”

The girl Lilly, second smallest at Muriel’s School for Girls, slips into the moonlight, lacing her fingers beneath her pudgy stomach. A ghostly nightdress is hanging over her whisper of a body. Her socks are far too large and rumpled in odd distortions. Lilly's hair is near as fragile as her frame, and the lightest blonde. Its fractured, sheer quality makes it seem to float around her shoulders in the musty midnight air.

“What is it? Are you alright?” Mr. Hush asks her once more. Her face is sullen, but her eyes hold a wistful cognition.

“I'm well.”

“Is that so, young flower? I thought I told you that you will probably be in bed for a very long time.”

“No, I remember. I feel well.”

“This is good to hear, but why, then, have you come out of your bed all the way across the school?”

“I just have to tell you something,” when Lilly said this, Mr. Hush's brow dips slightly -barely noticeably- in chorus with the creeping feeling of confusion, “ it's the small things. Sometimes, what looks one way, is actually different. Like in class, when we looked at the wood block on Ms. Cannon's desk. We couldn't tell how many sides it really had at first, 'cause some of them were hiding.”

“We will discuss this in the morning, young flower, come here.” He says, the floorboards moaning quietly beneath him as their shoulders take his weight. Mr. Hush limps around the edge of his desk. He uses a walking stick to supplement a knee injury he'd been capped with in war. He remains unmarried at this age, his life so occupied by the children at Muriel's. He'd been caring for them for a little over ten years, his heart ever too big to let any of them down.

“Sunlight will be along soon enough.” she protested, her baby-lips pouting.

“But, now it is the small of nighttime, my dear. You should be in bed, in your condition, remember what the doctor said?”

“Yes, I shall rest quite soon, I think. But, Sir?” Lilly asks, the man kneeling down to be on eye-level with her.

“Yes?” He asks.

“You've been good to us, you know. The children, here. This place made me happy, with all the girls. Keep it in good health, okay? I think it might need a doctor quite soon.”

“Lil?”

“I love you, Mr. Hush.” she whispers, embracing him in her thin arms.



The next day, Mr. Hush awakes with his cheek set against the fine, polished wood of his desktop. He peels a note from his cheek that had stuck there. He squints, examining it. It is about a meeting for a cute, simple couple interested in a red-headed girl named Kaira.

Mr. Hush sets his glasses on the bridge of his nose and stands up, wincing at the creaky stiffness in his back and the never-quieting moan of his knee. His fingers close around the brass handle of his cane and glances at the grandfather clock aging in the corner. Its glass is gray and speckled, its wood peeling like the frail skin of a true grandfatherly figure. The sun has only just risen, the early morning quiet still sleeping heavily in the halls of the Orphanage. I should check on the girls. Mr. Hush thinks to himself, as he tiptoes down the empty, wood-paneled corridors.

A few minutes later, Mr. Hush finds the girl, Lilly, dead under her sheets.