7.42 PM
Chloe Carter leant against the white edge of the alcove between Rooms 11 and 13, breath grey and misted, as she itched for another cigarette. She scratched her scalp. Her stomach pulled itself inward unhappily. The faces in the frosted glass—reflections—frowned at her. If she had to name a universal constant, it was the waiting room in the general ward. It never changed; chock-full of people with crooked backs, miserably scrolling on phones. The pain mangled their eyes. It showed her too much.
It was hell in white, and she refused to languish there.
She could hear Agatha Etwoth. Could smell that pruny staleness and bile like a bad perfume wafted against her pinched nostrils. The patient was moaning in distress in the room right behind her—at this point, the old woman’s lungs rattled like the rabid copper in a tin, occasionally eased only by a staccato of fluid-filled coughs. At least the electronic pump drowned out the noise. It was all so messy. So human. Chloe felt a distant pity.
The hopeful faces of the Etwoth son and daughter wouldn’t stay that way during the next visit. Someone would have to break the news soon. She was very good at making sure it wasn’t her.
The pager beeped.
As much as she wanted to ignore it, she glanced down.
Room 27. It would cost her an extra eight minutes back to the basement where her Volvo was parked. The room was a floor up; down the left corridor that wound like a bitter asp around the belly of the hospital estate. Funding had been slashed long before she was born, leaving the construction abandoned to a state of perpetual disarray—piles of brick and mortar rotted, leaving the unspooled wiring to corrode in cascades. As a child, she had stuck her hands down swollen paint troughs and thrown bits of rock from the roof on a dare.
All of it—the person she’d been—felt so terribly long ago.
With a pained exhalation, she headed for the stairs.
The bulletin board was a little different, she noted as she passed by. They’d taken down Santos. Good riddance. She never did like the man, and that was before the whole scandal broke last weekend. It was another lesson of life—that people were fundamentally animals. Creatures driven by impulse, with savagery lurking beneath a thin veneer of civility. In some ways, worse. Because it wasn’t for survival. It was just cruelty for the sake of it.
But sometimes—
It was different.
Unwillingly, she thought of her older brother again.
He was thirty-two now. In her mind, he was that same shaggy-haired teenager that taught her to ride a Trickshot, coaxed grungy screams from his battered guitar, and reeked of cigarette smoke and aftershave. He had also killed his ex-girlfriend. Thrown a homemade molotov into her house, as Chloe later found out. She remembered that day, clear as anything—the blue of his eyes fractured like a crystal lake hitting its resonant frequency. Stained in soot and coughing tears, he’d stumbled home and cried himself to sleep in her arms. She had pulled the blanket over him, whispered that it was going to be alright, then stood up and mechanically dialled the cops.
She nearly collided with the cleaning trolley.
She drew in a sharp breath, shaking off the daze.
“You alright, luv?” Erica asked. She ambled over, carrying an armful of packaged supplies. The charcoal fuzz of her hair was cropped short, stark in the sterility of the corridor. There was concern in the older nurse’s gaze—something soft and pliable.
“Fine,” she said.
Erica’s attention flickered to the pager, where it was clipped to the waist of her scrubs. The white backlight of the screen was still visible. “So, where are you heading?”
“Room 27. The one—”
“—with the,” she made a motion with her hands, an odd light in her eyes, “strange fellow. Dishevelled, handsome beneath the long hair… twitchy hands?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the one.”
Erica leant in close, quieter. “He’s been askin’ for you.”
I know.
They shared a long look.
“Well,” the other nurse shooed, after a while, “go on, then.”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Oh, and luv?” Erica’s voice carried, right before she popped around the corner. “Don’t be shy. Anything happens, call me.”
Left in the silence, she smoothed her hands against the side of her scrubs. As she reached for the door handle, she caught sight of herself in the glass—warped and stroboscopic in white light, the darkness of her pupils all the more profound for it. Not a single hair was out of place. She made her footsteps heavier, clogs scraping faintly over the threshold as she stepped inside.
8.01 PM
He was sitting upright this time.
The man’s name was Milos Vale, a newly transferred patient suffering from uveal melanoma. He was young. Almost tragically so; in his early thirties, if she remembered the chart right. It was difficult to tell at first glance though—the treatments had aged his face drastically, creasing taut lines like a child’s messy rendition of a constellation. He hid beneath a thick scruffy mullet, often only leaving the glimpse of an angular jaw and narrow nose. He spoke soft; but that was normal for someone learning to talk through the pain.
It became increasingly obvious in the days since his transfer, how the nurses’ routines seemed to bend around him and even the smallest requests kept getting routed back to her.
“Ms Carter,” he said, hands quivering over the bunched blanket as if conducting an unseen orchestra.
“You’re up early,” she said.
“The sedatives wore off quicker. Guess I’m just a stubborn kind of guy.”
The scarf he refused to be parted with was coiled around his pale neck, the red threads fluttering in the gust of the air-conditioning. His attention was focused wholly on her this time—uneven russet eyes sinking deep into hers. The veins in his scleras were a darker red today. Almost bruised.
She looked away first. She reached for the chart to compare vitals.
“Besides,” he said, “I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to miss it.”
“Miss what?”
“You.”
His heart rate was steady.
“I’m on shift.”
“I know. It’s almost over.”
Blood pressure was normal.
He tried again, “I’d ask for a cigarette but—”
“I’d prefer to keep my job. And you alive, for that matter.”
“I’m running out of time anyway.”
“Seems pessimistic.”
“Or pragmatic.”
She set the chart down. “Look,” she said, then took a measured breath. She rearranged her expression into something much more pleasant. Her skin felt as malleable as clay, desiccated right where she stood. “How are you feeling?”
“Like sand whittled away to bone by the ocean,” he said. “Like I’m being burned. Drowned. Shot. All at once.”
Without a word, she handed him the glass of water.
He didn’t take it.
“You’re avoidant,” he said.
The base of her skull prickled. “What?”
“It’s alright. You understand what it’s like to live next to something and never touch it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s a comfort,” he answered softly, “to think that I do.”
He held her eyes, without once blinking.
She realized too late. Her vision blurred at the edges and there was a rush of vertigo. And in that one look, he tore her open. Every stain, every blot, every crack and fracture. Every scrap of anxiety and fear and existence. She was standing. Kneeling. A field of silvergrass. Floating on the brackish water of a creek.
Laughter. A child.
Black. Nightlight. Stars on the ceiling.
In the sky. Fireflies.
Stop.
The taste of dirt. Falling. Laughing.
There was a girl biking down the lane. Laughing with an older boy. Riding Trickshots. Twin curly wisps of hair carded by the breeze, speckled sun-warmed skin. Smoke. A charred shirt. Burns washed in ice in the kitchen basin. Flashing lights—red and blue. Wailing, like the broken scream of a chord.
The brushstrokes of those memories drained away, so gradual she didn’t realize it until reality crushed back over her.
Her knees locked. She was crying, gasping for air as she returned to herself. She tried to stumble backwards, but there was a grip encircling her wrist like an iron manacle. The face of her brother melted, like a pitcher of hot wax was poured over bone, reforming into something gaunt and harsh. It was him. It was Milos—now nearly skeletal in the light, blood rolling from burst vessels in his eyes.
He told her, “The moment that you die will feel exactly like this one.”
Only then did he let go.
He went slack.
9.17 PM
They wheeled him out, pressed between a layer of sterile cloth and the gurney.
“I’ll take it from here.” Josie said, mouth tucked into a thin line.
Chloe said nothing. Her back was hunched against the visitor’s chair by the bedside, staring at the ruffled and stained sheets. It was almost like a rusty flower—those tracks of dried blood. Like misshapen petals laid against the pillow. She was paralyzed by the charge in the air. She was trapped in an unseen current, part of an inexplicable thrum. Her nails raked her skin with a renewed frenzy.
“Chloe.”
Bruises bloomed on the wrist he’d grabbed.
“Nurse Carter.”
The colloquial nature of that reprimand landed. She finally looked up.
“Your shift is over,” Josie reminded. “Go home.”
Home was a thirty minute drive. The night-crowd would be out by now, the road through town flush with ruddy drunks crawling to and fro the pubs. She’d have to take the Eyrie backroad if she wanted to cut past the old Dawson mill and pond. She liked the ducks there— the flock of mallards with their soft olive crowns and bespeckled feathers that nested close to shore.
But the house would be empty.
She didn’t want to be alone. Not then.
“I feel responsible,” she admitted.
“You’ve had patients die under your care before.”
“This was different.”
Josie peered at her intently. “Was something else going on? Something I should be aware of?”
“Not in the way that you’re thinking of.”
“Then?”
“I saw his eyes,” she said listlessly.
Josie sighed. “There are Section 31 forms at the reception.”
Accidental deathbed confessions weren’t as rare as people believed. While the eyes were the window of the soul, it was not a very good concealer of it – memories slipped through the cracks and hot flushes of emotion sometimes passed from one person to another. Section 31 was an established protocol for filing a report of potential criminal or suspicious activity from a second-hand witness. Chloe herself had filled out two or three forms over the course of her career.
But it’s all wrong this time. I saw myself.
The words lodged like stones in her throat.
“Alright.” She found herself nodding.
“Good,” Josie said, making for the door with the charts. “I’ve got paperwork to fill out myself. I’ll see you tomorrow, Chloe.”
She stood in the empty room. Her breaths mingled with the sounds of the ventilation and the hustle in the distance.
She hooked two fingers over her collar and tugged. It was stifling all of a sudden. She reached for the sheets and began to fold. Routine was a familiar balm. She poured the filled glass of water down a nearby basin. She switched off the infusion pump and dismantled it. She started to strip the pillows when something rolled out from within the casing.
It was a glass syringe.
It was still labelled.
What little blood was left in her face drained away. She picked up the intravenous bag. She saw it then—a small puncture in the connected tubing. It was not in a position that any sane nurse would have used. But it was at exactly an ideal height for a bedridden man. The concentration was at least twice the safe dosage. The implications of that sat like a knife in her empty gut. Silently, she slipped the Fentanyl into her pocket.
She would not file a Section 31.
Dead men had no culpability.
10.56 PM
She should have left an hour ago.
The styrofoam cup of coffee she had bought from the vending machine was already cold. She disposed of it on the third floor, and then consciously straightened the bin. She scrubbed her hands twice in the bathroom sink, and came out feeling lightheaded from the florid fumes of the soap. The coat pulled tight around her, she made a round around the last ward. It was a nervous habit she had developed in her first year—one final pass to reassure herself that everything was in its place.
But it was doing the opposite of soothing her nerves.
The world felt slightly to the left. The lights were too bright and the tiles were off-hue. She missed the radiology department door three times despite knowing that it was there. The janitor that she could have sworn was brunette was now blond—he’d even smiled at her, instead of cussing her out as he typically did. For God’s sake, she thought she’d even seen Santos, back in his scrubs and shiny boots, dithering around the corridors without a care in the world.
She was losing her mind.
By the time she finally surrendered and drove outside, the rain was pounding. It slithered like tar, scratching the goosefleshed glass of her windshield. The skies were alight—lightning crackling through a bulbous mass of spindly grey above. It looked like smoke from her cigarette.
She was idling by the traffic light when it happened.
There was a man in the Chevy next to her. Tall and olive-hued in the sodium arc streetlights. He saw her, and smiled politely.
Drawn like a moth to some aberrant flame, her eyes locked onto his.
And—like a heart held in a fist—the world squeezed.
She saw herself again, leant against the counter of a bar. She was wearing a black sequined dress, soft folds slipping low. The lipstick was three shades too dark. Her eyes were painted in a way that made her nauseous from the sheer indulgence of it. The man from the Chevy was sidled up next to her, face creased with laughter and fondness.
Two drink glasses clinked.
Thunder crashed.
She came back to herself with a vicious start. The malty aftertaste of the ale was cloying. She rolled down the window, just in time to lean over and vomit into the patch of grass at the side. Her stomach heaved as she emptied herself of the bile that purged itself from within her. She sat there, panting and shaking.
Next to her, the road was empty.
11.26 PM
Her phone rang.
The sound drilled itself into her head, until she couldn’t bear it any longer. She pulled over to the side, the tires of the Volvo rattling over shifting mud and gravel as it came to a rest on the shoulder of the road. Harsher than she intended to, she answered, “Hello?”
“Whoah there.” A man—one that she could not recognize at all—said. “No need to go biting my head off.”
“Who is this?”
There was a pause.
“Wait,” he said, “what?”
“I’m sorry. You must’ve dialled the wrong number.” She reached over to cut the call.
“No. Pretty sure this is the right number.”
“It’s not. I don’t know you. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
‘
“Holy shit. Are you drunk?”
She hung up.
Less than a second later, it rang again.
“Look—”
“Stop calling this number,” she said icily. “It’s the wrong one. I’ve just had a hell of a day, so I’d really appreciate it if—”
“You’re saved in my contacts, sis. Call log? All you.” The voice was smug. “Can’t bullshit the bullshitter, remember?”
Her first thought was that she didn’t have a brother. Not anymore.
Then everything went soundless.
She stopped breathing.
That was his line. The one he used when he wanted to win, no matter how asinine the argument. She could feel the smirk in it—curling beneath his stupid rumpled mullet.
She whispered, “Kieran?”
“The one and only.” He sounded as cheerful as ever. “Hey. You’re not still mad about Anna, are you? You know it wasn’t my fault.”
She shoved her fist into her mouth, and gagged on the scream.
“Aw, still? You two going to meet up at that coffee shop tomorrow? No doubt to bitch about me.”
“You—”
“It’s cool, it’s cool. Girl things, right? Besides. You’d never snitch on me. You love me too much.” He laughed. “I am sorry about things not working out between us. But she’s happier. I’m happier. Everyone wins.”
“Everyone wins,” she echoed dully.
“You always hated drama. Loser.”
“Jerk.”
It was instinctive. It was surreal. It was everything she ever wanted but could never have.
“Anyway… you still at the hospital, Doc?”
“No, I—”
She stopped. For a moment, there was nothing except for the scrape of the wipers and the jagged rhythm of the rain against the windshield. Something else was shifting inside her, iron-sharp—an emotion of chilling resolve. She disengaged the hand brakes, turning the car around. “Actually, yes,” she said, and ended the call. The dial tone hummed darkly in her ear.
She stomped on the accelerator without thought.
11.58 PM
The hospital morgue was cold. The attendant on duty hadn’t even given her a second glance. He was sitting out at the front, eating Thai takeaway from a styrofoam container. As soon as he saw her identification card, he nodded his head towards the door and went back glumly to his dinner. It took less than a minute for Chloe to find Vale—he was laying on the last gurney of the row. With a rock-steady motion, she hooked two fingers beneath the edge of the sheet and pulled it down.
She stared at him.
He looked peaceful. Much more so in death. More than he had any right to be.
The lights flickered faintly. His hair had been brushed back, exposing more of him than she had ever seen alive. The autopsy scar that stretched from shoulders to navel was fresh, the sutures black and precise. There was an empty space where his scarf had lived.
She stepped closer. She could almost taste the disinfectant in the air.
His eyes were closed.
She touched him. The skin was cold and waxen beneath her fingertips. It offered no resistance. Shadows pooled at the corners of the morgue, skirting her vision, as it twitched and stretched. She slid her thumbs in and lifted both eyelids. His pupils were vacant – inert – but it was looking straight at her. She waited for that rush or lurch of vertigo.
Nothing happened.
“You did this to me.” She accused. “Why?”
His blissful smile remained.
There was a pressure behind her eyes. She pressed a palm against it; her skin felt fevered and stretched. It was almost like an itch, nestled deep inside of bone. Her phone dinged. It was a text message from Kieran.
Grab a pack of cigarettes on the way home? Mother just found my stash 🙁
Her breath misted in front of her.
She stilled.
Something in the corner—shrouded and impossible—was watching.
12.00 AM
Her reflection stood, split under the fluorescent light. It had too many eyes.
And the pin clipped to it—
Doctor C. Vale.
It smiled.
She was not smiling.
Written by: Trishta
