The clock ticked slowly toward evening, shadows stretching long across the room as the light faded into a dull, amber hue. It was exactly 5:30 PM when the nurse checked again, her hands trembling slightly as she marked the chart. Baby Krito was still the same—still fragile, still silent, still so heartbreakingly weak.
He was the last one. The others—some stable, some improving—had already been moved, attended to, or reassured. But Baby Krito remained behind in that small corner of the ward, wrapped in too-thin blankets, his tiny chest rising and falling with barely-there breaths.
No one said it aloud, but everyone felt it: something wasn’t right. His body, so small and light, seemed almost weightless. He hadn’t cried all day. His eyes, when they opened, carried a glaze that was hard to read—more than tired, less than awake. The medical team whispered, consulted, adjusted monitors, but improvement never came.
This wasn’t just a bad day. It was the worst yet. His oxygen levels dipped lower than they’d ever dared. The gentle machines surrounding him beeped at slower rhythms. Despite the medications, the fluids, and the quiet prayers spoken over him, Baby Krito was slipping. Not fast, but steadily—like a candle losing its flame, flickering but refusing to go out.
At 5:30 PM, the world outside carried on. Traffic moved, people went home, the sun dipped into the horizon. But inside that room, time seemed to pause—frozen in fear, in helplessness. For Baby Krito, it was not just another checkpoint in the day. It was a fragile moment between hanging on and letting go.
His condition was labeled as “critical.” But to those who had watched him from the start, who had held their breath each time he twitched or stirred, the label felt too clinical. What they saw was not just a medical case. They saw a fight. A fragile, fading fight against odds that kept growing heavier by the hour.
And so, as the clock marked 5:30 PM, and the world kept spinning, Baby Krito remained—the last one, the weakest one, the one still surrounded by a silence that screamed louder than words. No change. No miracle yet. Just a tiny soul caught in the stillness, still seriously weak… and worst.
