John Doe laid in his hospital bed, seemingly sleeping. His full body casts nowhere to be seen, having been removed months ago. Clara was giving him a sponge bath, taking care of him like she had been doing for the past dozen months. She was still caring for the patients that she was given charge of, even though she was more than eight months pregnant.

Clara’s husband, David, walked in the door of the Long-term care ward. He was here to deliver Clara’s lunch that she had forgotten on the table, an oddity for her as she was normally a very diligent person. He walked to the desk asking for her and the head of the department pointed him over to his wife. He walked and when he arrived, he called out her name.

Clara immediately dropped the bottle in her hand as she turned to scold him, he knew better than to scare her. However, she did not get that chance. Clara gripped her stomach as a surge of water hit the floor, her water had broken right there in the long-term care ward.

She gave a great cry, calling for her coworkers to help her. Immediately several of her coworkers and David were by her side helping her onto the hospital bed next to the comatose John Doe. Her lunch having been discarded onto the floor in the flurry of her husband’s emotions.

The head of the department at the front desk for the ward was frantically pressing buttons, his voice rang out on the loudspeaker, turning heads as he spoke. “We need nurses with birthing training on the fourth floor immediately! Clara is going into labor!”

From his bed, John Doe could hear the nurses helping to deliver the Clara’s child in the next stall over to his. The nurses had to constantly push back David as he attempted to be with Clara to comfort her. Finally, he relented, standing back to let the nurses do their work.

Her labor went on for half an hour before she gave a final push, and the child was born. But the was no cry, the child that had been born was grey and lifeless, still born. David fell to his hands and knee’s when he was informed, that the child was dead. His grief only compounded when one of the nurse’s cried out, “She’s crashing!”

For several minutes they worked to stabilize Clara’s vital signs but, in the end, she was gone. They wrapped her child in a blanket, and placed it into its mother’s arms, a custom that had been passed down through time immemorial.

David wept as the nurse’s told him he had lost them both, David was allowed a moment with them before they were loaded onto a cart and taken to the morgue. David had never been a man of faith, but there next to the hospital bed of his dead wife and child he fell to his knees and he prayed.

No, he did not pray he demanded. He demanded an explanation, He demanded that God make this right. Clara had always been the faithful one, she went to church every Sunday without fail. He began to plead for God to take his life instead. David felt his life crashing down around him, that this small gesture of his, that his prayers had fallen on deaf ears. David embraced his wife and his little girl who were both gone too soon.

For those brief seconds, John doe laid in his bed listening to the man weep for his wife and child, for love lost, and a life the never truly had the chance to get started. So, he cast his gaze onward, down the river of time. All possibilities were laid out before him and so he looked into the future of this man. He did not have to look far before he saw its abrupt end.

What he saw for that man as things stood, was not good, but he was of no import. So, he looked ever onward until his eyes met, “The Gap”, as he had come to dub it. “The Gap”, was a short period of time, only a day, and it was decades away. Nearly every possible future after that day, was not a future he could accept.

The world was in flames, literally, bodies everywhere, the blood flowed like rivers. It was the end of all things, God’s apocalypse. He turned his attention to the girls on the bed. Of all those countless possible futures only a handful were acceptable, and all of those futures, required them to live.

In that moment, John Doe’s eyes flickered open as he sat up and got off the bed. His muscles should have atrophied while he slept, but his body was even more fit that the day it had been brough into the hospital. He tore aside the curtain startling David. Before David could demand for the man to leave, he noticed the unnatural glow in John doe’s eyes.

He faced David and proclaimed in a calm but firm voice, "Your prayers have not fallen on deaf ears!" Her husband’s eyes begin to well up with tears. John Doe stepped up to the bed where Clara and her child’s body now lay.

He placed a single hand on the head of her child and in a voice that seemed beyond compare, he looked down upon the small, grey, lifeless child and proclaimed but a single word, "Cry!"

For a moment nothing moved, nothing changed, then color came to the small grey child’s skin, there was a barely audible breath and then the crying of the infant.

The women’s husband was dumbfounded he knew not what to say or do. In the moment he was stunned, then Clara’s eyes flickered open and once again she drew breath. Her eyes wandered, for but a moment her eyes locked with those of the man she had taken care of so diligently for all these months.

In that moment they both realized something had passed between them. He smiled, closed his eyes, and drifted back to darkness. The nurses and Clara’s other coworkers arriving just in time to catch his body as it fell limp. She looks upon her savior and, in her eyes, he radiated green and golden light.