Grim Consequences

I woke up in a hospital bed without a single clue as to how I got there. I tried to get up, but I didn’t have the strength to move a muscle.

“What’s wrong with me? How did I get here?”

It was then that a nurse walked into my room. “Oh, you’re awake. Let me call the doctor,” she said.

As she turned to leave, I asked her what was wrong with me, but she looked at me a little confused and said she didn’t know what I was saying.

“What do you mean? I’m asking you what’s wrong with me!”

“Ma’am, please rest. I’m sorry I don’t know your language, but I’ll see if I can find someone to translate.”

I was perplexed. Was I not talking in English? Was I even awake? The exhaustion I felt and the pain I was in were both unmistakably real, so what was happening?

The nurse came back with a doctor, who introduced himself as Paul. He told me that a neighbour had found me unconscious in my yard. I tried to ask him what had happened, but he couldn’t understand me either. The doctors did several CT scans on me and they all turned out to be normal. There was no damage to my brain, but I seemed to be speaking a language no one has ever heard before. The doctors reassured me that they were doing everything they could to figure out what was wrong, but I was beginning to lose hope.

It was not long before my parents showed up, and they were soon in tears trying to figure out what I was trying to say. An idea then popped into my head. I quickly grabbed my phone from the desk next to me and started typing what was on my mind, but what happened right after made me almost drop my phone. The letters and numbers I was typing contorted and changed; the words I was trying to type switched and formed into a single, grim word: Murderer.

“What the…” I felt my phone slip through my fingers as I struggled to hold in the air in my lungs. I fell on my back and began to tremble, feeling my chest tighten with panic. At that moment, I remembered something: It was two nights ago. I was drunk and behind the wheel when I hit a woman. She wasn’t breathing, and I panicked. Since no one was around, I took her body and drove home to bury it in my backyard. And then, last evening, I heard noises outside the house and went to inspect them when I saw her ghost there, standing before me where I had buried her the night before.

As the memories flooded my mind, the ghost suddenly emerged from the hospital walls. I began to gasp and cough as she drew nearer—her cold eyes widening with rage and her mouth distorting with disgust.

“This is my curse to you. Confess or be forever unable to speak to anyone, till the day you die.”

I had no other choice. I confessed to my crimes that same day; I had to take responsibility for my actions.