The Passenger

Idylai was knitting a "flat with seams" sweater which she had worked from the bottom up; knitting the flat pieces, then seaming them together at the sides and sleeves. She liked working with flat pieces. They were handy for when she was on the go and she didn't want to carry the entire sweater in her bag.

Idylai Nunez had high blood pressure, she also smoked a pack a day and, on top of that, she was obese and, so, these factors contributed to her heart disease. She had just taken her blood thinner and a round of vitamins, but her blood pressure kept on raising and she had called the ambulance and was knitting as she waited. Not that she was getting any knitting done.

Breaking news had been alerting to a bank heist and were concerned with the current whereabouts of one, Callo "Kalisto" Edwards Runyan, wanted in connection with the armed robbery.

The phone rings and Camphor Nunez answers it, "Nunez residence."

"What? Sh@t! No. No. It's fine. Yes. I'll be right there.", Camphor hung up the phone, scooped up his car keys in the nearby dish and rushed off to Mercy General hospital.

Kalisto Runyan wasn't watching the car's rising speedodometer, he was counting money in his head as he headed out of state.

"There must be several hundred thousand in the bags," he thought and considered vainly, "I'm gonna buy me some more guns and see how much more I can rack up. These banks won't know what hit "em." He was so engrossed in thought he ran the yellow light and careened himself right into Camphor Nunez's truck in the intersection.

The blackness faded and Camphor was disoriented but he could make out voices.

"Hey! Yo! This dudes dead! Whoa, ho! What've we got here! Hey, yo, D! Check out this loot!"

"Ah snap! Hey, y'all get all that sh@t and kill that other fool!"

Camphor heard the sound of steel on steel and thought he heard the report of a gun shot, then he lost consciousness, again.

"Camphor. Cam. C'mon Cam, wake up.", the voice was that of his mother. He opened his eyes to see her in the passenger seat of his 1999 GMC Sonoma.

"There you are.", she said. "Are you okay?", she asked.

"I. I don't know. It burns like hell.", he said.

"Well, don't move. I've called you a cab to the hospital.", she set his green cased cell phone on the dashboard.

"I thought 'you' were at the hospital.", he queried with a riddled look.

"I'm fine. Don't worry. I came looking for you and good thing I found you, too.", she leaned in and kissed his cheek, then taking his hand in hers, said, "Momma's here. It's gonna be alright. You remember when you were little and you got scared and I would tell you a story. Let me tell you the story of The Little Prince."

Idylai tells Camphor of a pilot who crashes in the Sahara sand and then befriends some lost little boy from another planet, but, by the time she tells of the little boys reconciliation with a rose on the big asteroid he calls home, he has gone and fallen unconcious again.

When Camphor awakens, the local checkered cab has arrived and the driver helps him into the car, but then, he notices his mother is nowhere to be found. He arrives at the hospital and pays the cab fare and emergency room staff wheel him in and rush him off to surgery.

The following morning, Camphor awakens to a nurse adjusting his intravenous piston inserted in the back of his hand.

She greets him warmly and rushes off to inform the acting overnight physician, who was in the process of preparing to go home for the day, and he appears in the room shortly and says, politely, after having performed a round of very close and meticulous inspections of his fresh wounds, "It's good to see you awake and alert, Mr. Nunez. Your injuries were extremely life-threatening, but you arrived in time and you will be fine. You can go home today. I'll prescribe you pain killers and plenty of rest. No heavy lifting or strenuous activity until the healing has taken hold. Ok? Any questions?"

"Thanks, doc. Hey, listen. Any idea what was wrong with my mother last night? Idylai. Idylai Nunez." It hurt to move, but he could move and then he sat up while grilling the doctor for what information he could give him.

The doctor looked taken aback, at first, but immediately recomposed himself and said, "You don't know? I see. There's no easy way to put this ... I'm sorry to inform you, Mr. Nunez, your mother died within 15 minutes of arrival here last night."

Camphor Nunez was confused and in such disbelief. That couldn't be right.

"No! That can't be. She was fine, last night. She was with me. Wasn't she? I don't ... What happened? What went wrong?", he asked, unsure if he was dreaming or hallucinating.

But then, it occured to him, "Who called the taxi?"

The doctor tried to answer his short barrage of questions as simple and directly as he knew how, "Your late night ride had left before police could ascertain even the name of the company or the driver, they're making inquiries, but, as you know, it's such a humungous city and there are scores of services. They just don't have the manpower or resources to dedicate to a proper investigation. As for your late mother ..."

"She had died shortly as a direct consequence of the, sadly, fatal hemorrhagic stroke which had resulted from what we call, an arterial embolism. A cerebral embolism, to be exact."

"Idylai's delicate blood vessel in her brain was obstructed by some foreign matter travelling through her blood stream."

"It was largely due to her pre-existing heart disease."

The doctor paused a moment, then continued, "There was a weakened blood vessel with a bubble in it that grew until it burst or ruptured and bled into her brain and it did not get enough oxygen and nutrients which caused brain cells to die."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Nunez. We did all we could for her."

Camphor broke into tears, his chest filling with agony. Through his sobs he said, "Thank you, doc. I don't know what I'm gonna do without her." That was all that poor old Camphor could manage to muster up and give voice to.

"Again, I'm so very sorry for your loss.", the doctor said as he closed his charts.

"As soon as you feel ready, we have some paperwork for you to sign, then you're free to leave. The hospital will contact you about the arrangements for your mother. Unless there's anything else I can do for you, I'll leave you to absorb all of this.", said the attending doctor who had paused a moment and, having further heard no response, left the room.

About half an hour later, Camphor Nunez was flummoxed and pondered aloud, "I wonder how The Little Prince ended?"

An aid, one of the many lovely great beauties in teal uniforms with light flowered vests that had frequented his stay at the facility, had finished disconnecting all the medical rigging that had attached him to the slow and steadily dripping saline bladder and said, in a sound which was both soft and caressing as she spoke, "The man was able to go home and, not finding the prince's body, believed he had returned to his rose on his own world."

Camphor smiled the satisfied grin of a sheepish boy. He then inhaled deep and noisily through his nostrils before fast exhaling what was an even much louder forced breath, then he firmly reached and ripped back the linens and began to heave himself out of the bed. What he was now certain of was that Idylai Sirrilous Nunez had saved his life and he wasn't about to waste one solitary moment of it, anymore. He would begin by thanking his mother with the happiest and grandest ceremony that he could afford and that turned out to be quite a bit as police had apprehended the suspects who shot him and fled with the money and the bank decided to give him twenty percent for indirectly helping to recover the stolen goods.

He keeps a piece of the old Chevy's dashboard framed with the phone attached where it sat.

The pain is gone, too.