The Meadow 47 desperation caused by a condition more mental than physical. A whipstitch of disorientation runs along the edge of her words as she, twisted and broken, calls out, hoping for a response. I turn my head to block out the shrieks only to be confronted by a pocket of mauve pitched against steely and frigid shades of blue. Rotten colour for curtains, I think before the woman at the end of the line screams for Michael again. Husband? Father? Child? I’d put my money on son. Something about the scream suggests maternal knowing, but I care less as I approach the lip of an unseen ridge where, at the edge, my cells begin to liquefy. Katherine sways. My eyeballs waltz. My face is so hot it could give off smoke. Almost anything, if needed, will turn on it itself. Breakable is an airway that narrows and threatens to collapse, ushering in a singular apocalypse. 20:32 | 92/60mmHg | ♥ 99 bpm | 38.3 °C | SpO2 89% The alarms and flashing lights happen in tandem. Code blue. Everything is blue in this goddamned place. Scrubs. Curtains. Pills. Bodies short on life. The trays are as blue as the straws and bedding. Blue must be the colour of the door that Death steps through. The man in bed six coded less than a few seconds ago. His pulse nodded off and stretched out flat for the second time that night. The lull of the monitor trips the alarms, sending a flurry of warm bodies to his side. Security guards order non-staff and patients out of the room. Doctors shout over the clipped voices of nurses. Everyone fights to be heard over the machine’s high-pitched din. “Move!” “I can’t find a pulse!” “Where the fuck is Peter?” The scrimmage intensifies as metal crashes into metal and metal breaches flesh. A scalpel slices skin—the sound of a tear
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQ3NA==