A pin for the Dice

It was one of those long school holidays. You spend most of your time home doing absurd things, for memories. Or rather because you have a crazy brother who will do anything for laughs. A combination of your brother and yourself could be destructive than a missile explosion. 

Rachel, as her late father saw fit, was her name. She didn't like the name much. Who do you blame if some day you realize that you don't really look like a Rachel? That the left ear you see when you stare at the mirror should not really belong to Rachel. She was 14, her brother was 12. He was a freaky little boy with humour all over his face. He would make any situation look funny. You don't expect a dull day when you have Ryan for a brother. Their mom was their sole breadwinner.  

They lived far a way from the rest of their relatives. The closest relative was their aunt Rosset, with whom they had a crippled relationship after her last visit. During her visit, her house was broken into and swept clean. Rosset claimed that it's her (Rachel's mom) who organised the theft to fill her empty house. 

This was the last time they saw aunt Rosset. However, life has not been any different. Her mother still feeds them, pay their school fees and pays for damages whenever Ryan mess up in school. 

Apart from going fishing in the nearby river Rachel and her brother would take their dog Ted for a walk in the valleys adjacent. Over the recent years Rachel developed an interest is sewing and crocheting like her mother. During their last day out, Ryan got himself a bursted pair of pants as he tried to jump across a stream like Ted.

This was his new pair, bought just the other Friday. The agreement between them was that Rachel would mend his pant under a condition that he would be there fully to tell her stories and make her laugh. 

" Mom wasn't there most of the afternoons, that was when we would do our crazy shit like tying a fireworks on Ted's tail and crack our ribs when it ran away for it's life" she said. 

"That afternoon it rained abit earlier than usual, I made coffee and we went to our room, of course we shared a room-  everything actually, the bed and the sheets. Mom had told me that the sewing machine was broken down and warned me not to use it" she went on. 

They both sat on the bed, legs crossed over each other. Rachel took his pair of  pants and turned it inside out. She took the small sewing pin and fixed the black thread through it. Ryan was looking at her keenly like she wanted to learn a thing or two.

Rachel started sewing, she had the sewing pin in her pie hole to make it easy for it to go through the cloth. Ryan was there looking at her with his witty eyes like he was up to something. He toasted a dice he had in his palms in the air. The dice came down rolling, landed on the edge of the bed, bounced to the window and rolled down in the rain outside. Ryan cursed loudly and they all bursted into a laughter. He peeped through the window and told Rachel "Oooh the hell, it's gone!" 

She leaned back on the bed laughing when the pin slipped through her  lips and down to her throat. She caught her breathe for a moment trying to wonder what really just happened. She was left with the small piece of thread between her index finger and her thumb. She stayed inert as she felt the pin slide through either side of her GI tract.

She tried to stay as calm as much as she could, attempting to breath steadily not to make the pin forget it's way to the stomach and land in the lungs. Slowly the pin disappeared. She couldn't help it, she looked at her brother who was in a blue funk and whispered, "Ooh my God, it's gone!"

Her brother came back with a glas of water. All she asked was, "what for ?." What do you even do when you swallow a pin and it's heavily raining?. You're all minors in a lonely house, goodness !! She gobbled the glass empty  and went for another in the kitchen. As she was draining the last bit, the door knob twisted and her mom stood there ghostly, soaked in the rain. 

She mumbled, "mom I'm dying" and the next moment they were in hospital. Things begun to blur and everything was happening so fast. One moment she was seated the next moment she was in those hospital gown being bedridden to the theater.  

A series of X-rays were done, the pin was in her stomach. A six-person surgical team  was tasked to perform on her an emergency endoscopic surgery. The surgery was to be done as soon as yesterday before the pin could move to the intestine where it could be fatal. You don't want to see a 14 yr old die because of a half an inch pin in her intestines.

The place was a flurry of activities. Someone took off her earrings and put her hair in a cap. Another injected her with a bunch of needles, an IV to slow down her metabolism. The other lifted her into a gurney, wrapped her and rolled her down a hallway full of people. She felt embarrassed under the covers. Like "why are you guys exaggerating this whole thing ?" She felt like a shock victim in her last legs as they wheeled her down the corridors, being followed by the rest of the team - with them, a set of equipment and machines they would need .

She remembers in the theatre, one  female voice was explaining how they were going to put her out, drill a tube down her throat with a camera at the end... No, drill sounds bad. Stick a tube down her throat with a camera at the end and try to pull out the pin the same way it went in. 

"We wanna start your medication and you should be a sleep in five or less minutes," the anesthesiologist told her. This was the last bit of the moment in the theatre she remembers.

She woke up at 8pm in the recovery room with a very sore throat and a drip hanging beside her. She was handed a canister with a pin inside. The pin that had been to a place she would never be. A pin that was about to determine so many things in her mom's and brother's lives. She spent the next few hours thinking, what if mom didn't come back ?

She still don't know what brought her mom back home early that day. A guardian angel ?

Ryan showed up with a rose flower in the recovery room. He was in his pair of torn pants!