Project LAZARUS

     Was it Maisie? Mary? Something like Molly? Or Mandy? She could not certainly tell right now. But she knew it was somewhere in the middle of those ones. Or, she wondered to herself, was she wrong the entire time? Was it something that was longer and a little mouthful for everyone to say? Something like Magdalene and Mary Jane? Or Madeleine and Marjorie? She did not know! But surely it was not Melody for that did not ring any bell at all. Only one thing she was sure of and that was she could not tell what her very own name was. Moreover, what in the swirling world was she doing lying face-down on the banks of the polluted river in the middle of nowhere?        “Oh God! What the hell is wrong with me?”, she asked herself.        She never could remember a time struggling herself to stand on her feet. But as she tried to do so at that moment, she could feel the pain running through her every vein in the body, only to converge to a greater pain on her right chest. Still, she willed herself to stand up. She was wearing a wet and very dirty lab coat over a pink summer dress. And when she discovered what was causing the pain and the extreme weakness that she was having, she nearly fainted. For the right front side of the lab coat was stained with dried blood and directly over her right chest, over her very heart, was a small gaping hole unmistakably made by a bullet. It was only then that it finally dawned to her what really happened. She was shot.        The sight of the bullet hole on her chest brought new questions to her mind as the previous question of her true identity still remained unanswered. For her, the first and most logical of them all was who shot her? And then she asked herself why would they do something like that to her. She had no answers for those two questions. In fact, she had no answers for all of them. What happened before for her to deserve to be shot right to her heart? When did it happen and why did it happen? Who was behind all of that? And what in the good God’s name was the reason for it? She was beginning to feel a serious case of migraine as she forced her brain for any kind of answers to her troubling questions? But however she wanted to keep her mind off of the most important question that she should have asked herself, however she tried to bury it at the farthest corner of her mind, the thing just kept and kept on resurfacing. And she sensed an eerie and mysterious feeling as she murmured it to herself.        “If I was shot to the heart, then how and why am I still alive and breathing?”        It was not that she did not want to live anymore or that she regretted being alive again. But it was that what she was and what she seemed to have gone through defied all the logic, common knowledge and beliefs everybody knew about life. What she had become was a combination of mystery and miracle no one has ever witnessed before. And she had no idea whatsoever of how all of that even became possible.       But pondering about such trivial things while in the middle of God-knows-where was the least thing that she wanted to do at the moment. She had more significant things to attend to at the moment and the most of them was the silent rumbling of her tummy. She was hungry, no . . . she was starving. And she could not see anything ready-to-eat in the immediate areas around her. So, she began to pace forward. She just had a couple of steps only away from the banks when she suddenly stopped and looked down to her feet. The bridge of his nose along with her eyebrows and forehead all wrinkled when she discovered that only her right foot had that white rubber lab shoe on.        “So that’s why it felt cold on one while the other was warm and cozy.”, she told herself.        She bent her left foot backwards and then she reached for the wet shoe with her hand. Seeing she could no more use the single shoe alone, she turned around towards the river and threw the rubber shoe to the middle of it. She remained standing over there for quite some time as she watched the shoe getting carried away by the waters. The shoe floated under and over the currents for a few minutes until it disappeared out of sight when the waters reached the bend of the river. After that, she went on to find her way back home. But reality struck her hard on her face.        “And where exactly could that be?”        She felt so frustrated. How could she know where to go if she did not even know who she was? She could not remember her own name, her way back home, her own whole life. She was just a mere nobody, a dead woman who refused to stay down only to suffer the life of complete ignorance. But despite of that, her feet kept on moving forward and after some time, it brought her to what seemed a small market along the road. Somehow, she felt a weird feeling like she knew the whole place by heart. Even the various calls and cries of every single merchant sounded so familiar to her.        “Fresh fruits, everyone! We got apples, oranges and peaches! All of them freshly-picked!”        “Anybody looking for live chickens?! How about farm-fresh eggs?! Come, come, all of you! I’ve got them all here just for you, fellas!”        “Don’t forget about your nuts, people! We have all of its kinds in here. We have almonds, and walnuts. We got peanuts . . .. “        “Maggie! Hey, Maggie!”        The indistinct smell in the air of every goods being sold in the area and the rowdy hustle-and -bustle of everyone present suddenly flooded her mind with memories.        “I know this place.”, she told herself.         “Maggie!”        As if in a trance, she began to walk across the street towards the rows of elegant houses. She felt like somewhere along that decent-looking abodes was her very own home and it was calling her back now. She was almost near the driveway of the first of the rows when a strong hand held her right arm and dragged her back to the secluded corner. When the person spun her around, she hit her back against the rough wall of the corner building and she found herself panting. Not of weariness but of shock and fear that someone just decided to snatch her in public. Instincts told her she was in danger so she gave the person who did it a punch to the face. It was not much, really, but it downed the person in just a second.        “My God! What’s wrong with you, Maggie?”, the person asked her as she held her bleeding nose.        “Who are you?!”, she asked.        The girl stared at her in utter disbelief.        “Who am I? Are you kidding me? What happened to you? You look . . . shot.”        She did not know what the girl really meant with that. But she had other thing bothering her mind and that was what she asked the girl.        “Who’s Maggie?”