The Two Years They Were Given

Two Years

The doctors gave him two years.

He accepted the news with the exhausted calm of someone who had already spent too much of his life negotiating with death.

As a child, polio had taken away the simple, thoughtless act of breathing. While other children ran through open fields, climbed trees, and returned home with dirt on their knees, he learned the measurements of a machine. He knew the curved walls above him, the mechanical rise and fall of its pressure, and the narrow view available through a mirror positioned near his face.

The iron lung breathed because his body could not.

For two years, he lived inside it.

Two years of metal surrounding him from the neck down. Two years of hearing life happen beyond the machine: footsteps passing through corridors, doors opening and closing, conversations beginning where he could not follow. Nurses adjusted his blankets and checked the equipment. Visitors stood near his head and tried to smile as though everything were normal.

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This story runs 1 chapter — most readers finish in one sitting, and you can stop and return to any chapter using the contents list.

Who wrote it?

Nimra Khan — original fiction published on RapidTale.