The best thing for her to do was to think of as many positive things she could but with such little trust in her own judgement, she had been told that a good way to get her through her illness was to imagine it was someone else telling her these good things. She had always valued others opinions far more than her own.

Miranda imagined many characters, before it came to the non-existent face that she found most believable. Strangely, her new voice of reassurance came in the form of a very petite, young girl of between eight and ten years old. She had neat, brown, hair with a straight, fringe and she wore a grey, school dress with a white, blouse, underneath which floated above her pale, pointy knees. Miranda imagined the girl had tiny, black, buckle shoes with silver buckles yet she didn’t choose to imagine socks for the girl. The girl wasn’t in any way distinguishable from any other young girl, she didn’t have a strange accent; of course Miranda’s own voice took the voice of the child, her imagination wasn’t great enough to imagine different voices, Miranda never knew how to do accents. She hadn’t even decided a name for the imaginary girl, although she decided not to get to obsessed with this character, her only purpose was to create a zone to collect her positive thoughts from.

A month went by of Miranda coming to terms with her illness by thinking of the little girl. When the pain became too much and when scans became too mundane, Miranda reached for her imagination and prayed that the little, girl would take away the pain for her and she would always imagine the little, girl, playing with a toy or skipping around the room as she, without any thought, giggled 

“Okay, Miranda!”

And for some reason, it made everything, every bone in her body, feel so much better.

It was midnight when Miranda was woken up by a sound of someone coughing and rather violently at that. The room was dimly lit by a single ray from the moon that had snuck through the curtains, not enough light to see anything clearly though. As Miranda turned to switch the bedside lamp on, she was startled by a dark, shadow that hid directly opposite the lamp. Before turning the light on, she indulged her curiosity and stretched herself to look beside her bedside table...A girl.

Miranda smacked the light switch, as if the light would take her away from the vision, but it only made it clearer. It was the girl from her imagination, clear as life, curled up by the bedside table, coughing. She didn’t say anything, she was too shocked, was this a side effect of her illness? Did this happen to everybody?