Love Again

By DW Cook

Shay had lost her family, and the will to live. In one moment, she stood on the verge of suicide, and, in the next, she was with a strange little boy she had never met before...who kept calling her "mom". (Approximately 12,000 words.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: DW Cook
• Release date: Nov 23, 2018

DW Cook

I live in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. I am a lawyer by day, but I enjoy writing both fiction and non-fiction. My hobbies include: dancing, target shooting, and learning about almost everything under the sun.

Book preview

Love Again

DW Cook

© 2018, WD Cook

http://dwcookfiction.com/

Shay had stolen the pills. When she stopped by the hospital to visit her friends for lunch, she had snuck into her old doctor’s office. She found his tablet computer in a desk drawer, and she used the pin he never updated. Once on the hospital’s network, she wrote up a couple of scripts for the proper combination of drugs using his electronic signature.

At the hospital pharmacy, she picked up her order, and pocketed it. By the time it would be noticed in an audit, she would be long gone.

Not wanting to get him in trouble, she was leaving behind a note explaining how it wasn’t the doctor’s fault. She had included suggestions for improving the security of the hospital’s IT systems to prevent other disgraced nurses from stealing drugs.

She had voluntarily resigned her license rather than go through the embarrassment of revocation. She had arrived at the hospital three sheets to the wind, just prior to a scheduled surgery for a patient, after a night of boozing, drugs, and fucking Nick. She was thankful her downward spiral hadn’t hurt any patients.

Not like I needed the money after the car wreck anyway, she said aloud. I should have just quit when I got the settlement check.

The suicide note finished, she stared at the pills. Little reds, and yellows, and blues. They seemed to wink at her in the light of her bedroom, just like the flashing colored lights outside her door when the police had come with news of her husband and little girl.

I’ll be with you soon, she said, looking at the picture of Allen and Tiffani on her nightstand. They had taken it on their previous, and last, family vacation.

She didn’t really believe, but she hoped. Hoped there was a little piece of them out there, somewhere, in the universe.

When the transport event, as she would later call it, happened, she was there staring at the picture of her husband and daughter, pills in hand. There was a blinding light that seemed to engulf her, and then she was standing in a deep trench. The sun was above her warming her body –her whole body. The clothes she had been wearing were gone. The pills she had been holding were nowhere to be seen.

She stood nude in a ravine or gully with sheer dirt banks about seven feet tall on each side. She could hear the waves of an ocean crashing in the distance. She wasn’t sure which ocean, because she lived several hundred miles from the nearest sea.

A boy with a blonde mop of hair, age about ten, stood in front of her. His hands grasped what looked like an urn or a vase. He lowered the container from his lips, and she came into his field of view. His baby-blue eyes grew wide.

Mom?! Why are you naked?

###

What the hell is going on? Who are you? Shay moved at the boy like one of the Furies, and grabbed him by the shoulders. The vase he had been holding tipped sidewise, pouring most of its contents onto her, drenching her from the waist down. The water seemed to tingle, and it felt like tiny worms were burrowing into her skin.

What are you doing here, mom? Where are you clothes? the boy said, his voice trembling.

Quit calling me that! What kind of game are you playing? How did you do this?