Pollen's P.O.V.
Leo stood a step back, keeping quiet as Zachy and I spoke. The grass rustled around our knees, a gentle sound that barely registered against the heavy thrumming in my chest.
"Today marks the sixth anniversary of my college graduation," I said, my voice dead and calm in the afternoon air.
Zachy listened intently, tracking every word even though I had already told him this story twice before. This was the third time I was saying it aloud, but the words felt like they needed to escape, if only to remind me why the air in this cemetery felt so suffocating.
"And that was the exact moment," I continued, "that my mom met her final moments."
-FLASHBACK-
The sun was blindingly bright, reflecting off the polished concrete of the university courtyard.
Graduation day.
Everywhere I looked, students were tightly gathered in front of the main stage, their black gowns billowing in the light breeze. The entire campus was a crowded, chaotic sea of bright smiles, loud chatter, and proud parents holding bouquets.
I stood near the row of engineering chairs, my fingers nervously twisting the fabric of my gown. I kept scanning the entrance gates, waiting for my mom to arrive.
We hadn't traveled to the campus together. Before I left the house, she had pushed me out the door, laughing and claiming she wanted to arrive later to "surprise" me.
"That's not a surprise anymore if you're telling me beforehand that you want to surprise me," I had told her, rolling my eyes.
She had just smiled that warm, radiant smile of hers, kissed my cheek, and shoved my cap into my hands.
"Just hurry up and get to school already, Pollen. Don't be late."
When I reached the courtyard, the noise was deafening. Classmates were tossing their heads back, exchanging quick congratulatory messages.
"Hey, Pollen! We actually made it!" Sarah, a girl from my advanced database track, yelled over the din, waving her degree cylinder in the air.
"Are you ready for the corporate grind?"
"I think so," I called back, forcing a quick smile.
"Just waiting on my mom."
"She'll make it! See you at the after-party!" she shouted before being pulled away by her parents.
But as the minutes ticked by, the gate remained empty.
"Anderson, Pollen."
The speakers boomed, and it was my turn to walk up the steps.
I took one last, desperate look around the perimeter, searching for her familiar silhouette among the rows of spectators, but there was nothing.
I took a deep breath, swallowed the rising lump of anxiety in my throat, and walked across the stage to accept my graduation certificate.
Camera flashes strobed against my eyes, people cheered loudly, and the background noise swelled into a roaring static. Still, no sign of her.
The moment I stepped down from the stage, I didn't return to my seat.
I walked straight toward the main gate entrance, convincing myself that she had just gotten caught in the Ginkgo Town transit traffic. I pulled out my phone and dialed her number, but the line clicked instantly, forwarding me straight to her voicemail.
Ring.
The phone violently shook in my hand a second later. The screen lit up, displaying my mom's name.
A surge of pure excitement hit my chest. I swiped the screen quickly, pressing the phone to my ear.
"Mom? Where are you? I just got the—"
"Is this Pollen Anderson, the daughter of Mira Anderson?"
The voice on the other end wasn't my mother's. It was cold, deep, and completely unfamiliar.
My hands began to tremble. A sudden, icy chill shot down my spine, and my legs felt entirely hollow. My eyes grew watery as a heavy, suffocating pressure slammed into my chest.
"Y-yes," I whispered, my voice shaking so hard the syllable barely formed.
I bit down on my lower lip, tasting iron.
"This is the police department," the voice said, stripped of any emotion.
"Your mother was just hit by a trailer truck on the junction. She's lost a critical amount of blood. Please head to the municipal hospital, room 202, immediately."
My heart completely sank.
The phone slipped through my numb fingers, hitting the concrete with a dull crack.
I didn't pick it up.
I turned and ran out of the school gates, sprinting toward the road without looking back.
My vision blurred into a smear of tears and gray asphalt as the screams of the graduation crowd faded into nothing.
She had been standing in our kitchen with that warm, bright smile just hours ago. And now... a truck?
Is this a dream?
My mind screamed as the hospital doors loomed ahead.
Please, someone just wake me up from this nightmare.
The hospital corridors were a blur of sterile white walls, the sharp smell of antiseptic burning my throat as I ran blindly down the hallway.
I found room 202.
The heavy door was already unlatched, and a young nurse stepped out as I approached, her expression instantly dropping when she saw my tear-streaked face and crumpled graduation gown.
She opened the door wide enough for me to pass through, but she didn't close it when she stepped back out into the hall. She was giving me space.
"Call me when you're done, Miss."
She said softly, her voice heavy with a clinical kind of pity.
"..."
"I am so sorry for your loss."
Then she left, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking quietly against the floor tiles until the sound faded completely.
I stood in the center of the silent room, catching my breath in short, ragged gasps. My chest heaved violently as I forced my feet to move forward, one agonizing step at a time, toward the narrow hospital bed.
In the center of the room, beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, a long shape lay perfectly still under a thin, white hospital blanket.
'No, it's not her.'
My mind frantically whispered, over and over, like a prayer that could rewrite reality.
'It's not her. Please, God, let them be wrong.'
I was trembling so violently my teeth clicked together. I clapped both hands over my mouth, trying to choke back the breathless, desperate sobs that were tearing through my throat. I couldn't stop crying.
"You said you were going to surprise me," I said aloud, my voice cracking, my lips shaking so badly I could barely form the syllables.
I looked away from the bed, staring at the blank, beige wall beside it, unable to bring myself to look directly down.
"Is this the surprise?"
The silence of the room was absolute. No monitors were humming. No machines were ticking.
"Please, no," I whispered to the empty air.
Slowly, my shaking hand reached out, my fingers tangling in the rough, cheap cotton of the blanket. I pulled it back, slowly revealing her face.
Thud.
My legs instantly gave up. The strength left my knees so fast I hit the hard hospital floor before I even realized I was falling. My hands fell uselessly to my sides, brushing against the metal frame of the bed. I froze in complete shock, the breath trapped in my lungs, though the tears kept flowing down my face without a sound.
"No..." I whispered.
I dragged myself backward until my spine hit the cold, painted wall. Bending my knees, I pulled them tightly against my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs to hold myself together. I hid my face against my fabric-covered knees and just let go, crying completely non-stop, the sound muffled by my gown.
On the bed, my mom looked completely unrecognizable.
The vibrant woman who had left the sisterhood behind just to raise me, who spent every single day pouring everything she had into our small family, was just gone.
Her face was entirely drained of color, pale and hollow, and her skin had this heavy, cold stillness to it under the harsh hospital lights. Her graying hair was pushed back untidily, revealing a dark purple bruise near her temple. Her lips—the same ones that had smiled and told me to hurry up so I wouldn't be late—were completely dry and gray. It didn't look like her at all. It just looked like a shell.
She is dead.
The realization slammed into me like a physical blow.
No, God, why?
Sitting there on the floor of room 202, hidden behind my own knees, I started questioning God.
Why her? Why today?
Why did she have to leave the church and adopt a nameless orphan, spending ten years fighting the system, just to be taken away on the exact day I was supposed to make her proud?
The silence inside room 202 was so heavy it felt like it was crushing the air right out of my lungs. I couldn't stop crying.
Every breath I took came out in ragged, shaking gasps that echoed loudly against the bare, sterile walls. I buried my face deeper into my knees, pressing my arms tightly around my legs, trying to squeeze myself small enough to disappear.
There were no machines ticking, no nurses talking outside, just the awful, mocking quiet of the room and the sound of my own breathless sobbing.
The floor felt freezing beneath me, but I couldn't move; I just sat there in the dark of my own gown, completely broken, wondering how a room with only two people in it could feel so completely empty.
One dead. One alive, but feels like dying inside.
***
"I arrived at the hospital, and they told me she was dead on arrival," I said, the memory cutting through the present silence of the cemetery.
"She lost too much blood before the ambulance could even reach the junction."
I smiled faintly, the old horror still hunting the edges of my mind.
I wasn't crying, and the sharp, biting sadness had settled into something numb and hollow long ago. My voice was steady, almost casual, as I simply continued the conversation.
"The police told me that my mom was holding a bouquet of white lilies with a small graduation message," I said, tracing the edge of my bag.
"It said: To my dearly loved Pollen, congratulations on your college graduation. I am so happy to see you graduate and continue to strive for your dreams. I love you, from Mom."
I looked up at the quiet trees, my expression completely flat.
"The bouquet and the letter had a stain of blood and couldn't be kept according to the police. So they just took a picture of it and gave it to me."
Zachary looked down at his shoes, his shoulders slumping slightly. He had heard me tell this exact story twice before, so the details weren't a shock to him, but the mention of the photo always made him quiet.
Leo, however, went completely still. It was his first time hearing the full story of that day. He shifted his gaze from the gravestone back to me, his sharp eyes softening just a fraction as he absorbed everything. The wind rustled the leaves of the old oak tree above us, dropping a single, withered brown leaf onto the corner of the plaid blanket.
"I didn't know about the picture," Leo said quietly, breaking the silence.
He looked over at Zachy.
"You never told me that part."
"It's not my story to tell, Leo," Zachy murmured back, his voice thick as he bumped his shoulder against Leo's. He looked back up at me, giving my arm a small squeeze.
"But she still has it. We kept it safe."
Leo nodded slowly, his expression serious as he looked back down at the tombstone.
"She was a good woman. To think she was trying to get to you until the very end."
"Yeah," Zachy swallowed hard, clearing his throat as he tried to shift the heavy mood.
"She never missed anything important. That's why we're out here today. We aren't going to let the tradition stop."
I took a long second to compose myself, drawing the cool air into my lungs before looking over at Zachy and Leo. The candles on the stone had gone completely cold.
"Let's go," I said, shifting my tone back to a normal, even register.
"I don't want to waste too much of your time."
I glanced down at the grave one last time, my eyes lingering on the chocolate-strawberry cake.
"I know she's happy that I visited her today and gave her favorite flowers."
I stood up, stepping off the plaid fabric, and carefully brushed the loose grass off my pants. Leo got up first with an effortless, fluid grace, then reached down and gave Zachy a firm hand up. Together, the two of them helped me fold the heavy blanket, shaking the dry dirt from the edges before handing it over to me.
"Zach cares for you, so don't worry about it," Leo said, his dark eyes locking onto mine.
He paused, then reached out and patted my head with an unexpected, gentle pressure.
"And it's not your fault either, so don't blame yourself."
A profound wave of relief washed through me, a temporary shield against the grief. Having them by my side was the only thing that kept the ground steady beneath my feet. Leo's eyes were always sharp as a knife, but his voice when he said those words was surprisingly soft, like cotton.
"Thank you, Leo," I murmured, reaching out to take the neatly folded blanket from his hands.
But the moment my fingers brushed the wool, my head violently spun. A sharp, blinding wave of dizziness hit me completely out of nowhere, making the gray tombstones tilt sideways.
My knees buckled slightly, and before I could even blink to clear the black spots from my eyes, the artificial fog of my medicine shattered—and their thoughts started exploding into my head.