Shortsketch #1 - untitled

Introduction

I gazed into the sky above, cloudless and filled with stars innumerable. Why did things turn out this way? And why am I okay with it? My thoughts should be in turmoil, but yet all I could do was smile and accept it despite myself. I suppose that was the biggest piece of evidence that it was truly time to move on. Such a shame. He had liked it here, with it's rural surroundings and simple, kind folk. Not like the people where he had been before. He said he thought that's where he would head again, back to the city, back to the underworld, so teeming with life and yet so dead. He had only been in that small town for a few weeks, and yet already it seemed like he had spent a lifetime there. I closed my eyes, and tried to think back to the beginning..

"Mom! Mom! Come quick! There's a man out here and I think he's bleeding!" Kayl shouted. The small child of roughly eight years was staring in shock, his bright blue eyes wide with amazement and fright. His mother, a young-looking woman of roughly twenty-six years, came running out at a prodigious speed - her son was not known for making up stories, so she tended to take him seriously when he said something with as much import as he just had.

And he had not been speaking falsely - there was a man out in the field, lying on his chest, half-curled and with a trickle of blood starting to pool under him. Kayl's mother gasped.

"Kayl! Quickly, Go fetch Doctor Lien, right now!" she shouted. Kayl took off like an arrow, jumping fences and taking shortcuts until he came to the faded door labeled with the local doctor's name. And that's how I came in to the whole thing.

You see, Doctor Lien is a good friend of mine, and I was in town visiting him. We had gone to medical school together, but while he had come out here to treat people who were far from help in ordinary circumstances, I had gone to a large city - the largest one I could find, actually. I was a trauma surgeon, having paid my way through medical school working as an emergency responder I found that I still preferred being a part of the immediate response, even if the hours were terrible and the things we saw.. well, they weren't fit for a decent person to have to see. So, of course I volunteered to go with the good doctor and take a look, and help as much as I could.