**ROSE**

Garbled by a vast distance, a voice pierced the shroud over Rose's mind. The still darkness around her weighed down her limbs and froze her lips, preventing any movement. Without the ability to speak, see, or move, all Rose could do was listen.

She shoved aside the comforting nothing and strained to comprehend Crane's heated words. The anger in her husband's voice bit out into the dimness, burning off layers of haziness until the sound rang through her.

"I refuse to believe there's no solution," Crane said.

The rage of his tone smacked against Rose, but beneath it was something that hurt her more—a deep weariness. If her hands hadn't weighed a million tons, she would have lifted them to comfort him, smooth his wild curls.

"I'm sorry, Crane," another man said. His voice had the slight crackle that came with advanced age. "You have enough medical training to understand what these signs mean. You've read her vitals. I can't refute anything the doctors have told you. Refusing the truth won't help you or Rose."

Rose stretched out mentally, pressing against limbs as responsive as stone. Pounding against her eyelids—steel shutters to her lonely world. If only she could find a crack, a single weak point, and could move. She could rush to Crane, tell him death came for everyone in their turn, that she loved him and had never blamed him.

"I have done everything the medical doctors asked," Crane's voice was closer now. "Everything. I won't accept she's getting worse, that..."

"I think you need to prepare yourself for the inevitable. Her brain is shutting down. It's not what I want to say, but it's true. This must be very hard for you, but she's already weakening. From the readings, within a few weeks, even if she wakes up, she won't be your wife anymore."

The voices faded until they were a no more than a hum under the warm blanket of her mind.

Was she brain damaged? She didn't know how to test the idea. Crane was the smart one. He'd always said she was the heart, but she had silently disagreed. That was him too. And now all Rose could be was a weight around his neck, a grief that wouldn't fade because her stupid body insisted on remaining alive.

If stopping her lungs from drawing air were possible, she would have. Crane should be able to continue with his life. In spite of the despair cloaking her, she had memories to live off of, but for Crane, would he allow himself that comfort? He'd always blamed himself for her disappointments.

His voice, even without words, hummed in the background as days passed and brought back swelling memories of their life.

She recalled their honeymoon. He'd taken her five miles from town to a bed-and-breakfast for a long-weekend. It rained the whole trip—a freezing rain with a biting wind. They'd laid under a floral comforter together, and she'd told him about all the wonderful vacation spots in her travel magazines—places they'd go someday. It wasn't until she found Crane studying her vacation notebooks that she realized he had no idea how perfect that time was for her. He thought he'd failed her.

Sure, she liked to daydream of distant locales and five-star hotels that cost more than he made in a month, but a day in the rain with him beat any exotic location without him. Crane was her real dream. He was a warm, steady home filled with love and acceptance. If only she'd been able to make him see.

"Rose, it's not ready," Crane's voice filtered in.

She imagined his soft palm, the skin dry from too much hand-sanitizer.

"What else can I do?"

Tears burned inside her, unspent, clogging the emptiness with words that frothed behind the dam of her unresponsive lips.

"If I'd just come home an hour sooner that day, you would be fine. I cannot give up now... this was the point of it all—you. Always you, Rose. The machine isn't ready to be tested. The dispersal of energy is wrong; the variations must have slimmer variations in the final distribution."

As Crane moved, something crashed, shattered. Unseen, glass shards flew all over the room. A room she'd never seen.

Crane had moved to this house in what had seemed like a bribe to Rose's spirit. She'd begged him for years to move to Able's Hollow. The university had a reputation for accommodating research scientists. He could teach and work on his projects. But he'd refused.

Rose smiled at the memory though her lips never twitched.

"Able's Hollow?" Crane had said, his foppish brown hair falling over his glasses as they walked through the woods surrounding their house. Ahead of them was a small wooden bridge.

"I've looked at the statistics," Rose had said. "Temperate weather—so not too cold for me in the winter or too hot for you in the summer. It's only an hour from your folks and less than two from mine—"

"No, Rose."

"Can you really be so superstitious?"

"My brother still calls me the family's Ichabod. Ichabod Crane, a teacher and intellectual—"

"I've read the Legend of Sleepy Hollow," she said. Though she hadn't. She had seen the movie. "A town's name is a stupid thing to inhibit us. The university here won't let you do anything. Six times this week you've mentioned you need a new position. We could be happy there."

"We are happy here." Crane stepped up onto the bridge, gazing across the stream where a patch of wild strawberries beckoned them.

"I'd be happier on the other side of the bridge." Rose dropped his hand and ran over the wooden boards.

Berries filled her memory. They had been the sweetest she ever tasted, often taken from his fingers or lips while the water gurgled at their trespass.

In the distance, over the streams admonishments, she heard Crane's machine turn on—a low whir and several clacks. Those noises didn't belong in the memory; they belonged to the cold black world after Rose's accident. The stream faded as did the ghost taste of berries. A clatter of metal on metal.

"I love you so much, Rose. This needle should do it. This will integrate the necessary compound into your system. My life for yours. It should be enough, but there are so many errors. I can't get the one-to-one ratio I need. And the variation... I'm not sure what will happen anymore, but we can't wait. The process takes six days. Six days never seemed so long. Just hold on..."

Consciousness dimmed, pulled from her. Time passed without her full comprehension. It might have been days or weeks. In the emptiness, a vacuum of time that spanned forever, something pricked her arm, shooting rivers of ice with jets of bubbling heat through her. The dark boiled bubbled and swallowed her.

A wave of light hit her, and her eyelids fluttered. Rose stirred inside herself. The dark stripped away, leaving her naked. The back of her heel slammed into a hard surface as she kicked out, and ripples traveled up her body, like a reverberation through gelatin. She lay on her back in a shallow tub, and above her the gray ceiling came into focus.

Rose sat up, her mouth hanging open, flapping as she struggled for air. A clash of color assailed her eyes. Red and green flashed, and all around her a gooey, blue liquid glowed. A few wires snaked through the blue, fixing themselves to her pale flesh.

Sounds like half-formed words fell from her—five years of thoughts and desires clashing for release from lips that had not moved in just as long.

Her body shook, causing the gel to quiver. Light reflected from its surface, dazzling her eyes.

"Crane?" she croaked, her first sensible utterance.

Other than clinging bits of gel, she was naked and her arms crossed over her bare chest. She blinked and squinted, trying to make sense of the jumble of machinery around her. Metal panels dotted with lights, displays, and buttons lined three of the room's four walls and linked to a central panel on her left. She shoved herself up out of the bath and forced her legs to hold her.

Just on the other side of the control panel, Crane lay in a similar construct to hers, only his was empty of the blue gel and no wires were affixed to him.

Rose stumbled out of the tub over to him and grabbed his hand. No response. What had he said about the machine?

She slapped her forehead, but the jarring brought no more insight into the machine. He'd told her about most of it, in terms only other scientists would understand. All she knew was that the gel conducted energy without having to convert the form of the energy.

"Crane," she repeated with more force. She shook his shoulders, and his head lolled lazily to the side.

Not so much as a facial twitch. She leaned into the tub, pressing her torso to him and her lips against his. He had to wake up. She wouldn't let him sacrifice himself. The subtle rise and fall of his chest told her he wasn't dead, but she knew all too well that a coma wasn't really life. She had to undo it. Only he'd never said anything about rectifying the project if it went awry. Was this what he'd intended?

*AN This story was written for target fairytale competition. Since I don't have a novel going I decided I would try it out. There will be four sections to this story. Please vote/comment and let me know what you think. Votes on the first chapter between June 14th and 21st will decide who the finalists in the competition are.