Rain, which had long been absent on this island, was an unfamiliar sound to Pru, yet she found herself comforted by its staccato beat. An unsettled feeling of foreboding was tapping at her consciousness and her throat was sore and scratchy. She tried a small cough, her voice sounding far away and not at all like her own, and pain coursed through her body with torrential force. Her stomach erupted with a fire that she was unable to name. With her eyes squeezed shut she tried a deep breath through her nose but her expanding chest met aching ribs and caused an arrow of pain to shoot through her left shoulder. But still Pru didn’t open her eyes. She knew there was something she needed to remember but, with equal certainty, she knew there was something that she did not want to recollect. While the shutters on her eyes were able to block out the sights in front of her face, the smells assaulting her nose were not so easily kept at bay. There was something different about her room today.
