She just stepped foot in a crooked hospital,

Her hands are hot and her knees are trembling.

Her neck is caving in like the way water ripples to the weight of a rock.

She swallows sourly and stares at the waiting room—broken chairs, broken people:

People crying and moaning about how ‘everything’ hurts.

She wipes the sweat from her forehead and deposits it on her scrubs.

The thoughts are swarming like little insects as she anticipates who she must wait on next.

She walks into a room full of white walls and surgical beds all occupied by the injured.

Young boy, about 4’4” suffering from a broken rib cage, red head with a collapsed lung and an injured vertebrae. An old man breathing his last breathes while his wife sits by his side; they can be seen through a window with thick glass.

She, wearing purple scrubs and a sparkling lanyard. She feels as if she’s in a strange place. Something seems unfamiliar about it, the smells, the faces. Doctors, nurses, and the injured rushing past her—

“Stat!”

“HELP ME!”

“Move it!”

She’s got a cellphone in her right hand, dangling, almost as if she’ll drop it soon. Her fingers feel clammy. Her throat is tight with anxiety. Her ears feel like they’re ringing. People go around her as if she is an island in the center of a busy intersection.

“Hello!”

She can hear it. It’s in slow-motion. A person calling, deeply muffled by something. By her hand. Her vision starts to strain. The lights are too bright and the ringing in her head intensifies, like a car-horn with a person’s head attached to it. She loses her balance and collapses to the floor, eyes wide open as she watches the world around her move on. She feels like a ghost until she is noticed by waned voices that sound like the adults from Charlie Brown. Screams are heard echoing in the distance, probably from someone who is in far more pain that she could ever know.

She awakens to the sound of wind and something swinging. It sounds very heavy as if it will snap. It sounds like hard plastic rubbing against a piece of foam. The wind can be heard ruffling through leaves and a hollow alley way. In a hospital next to a financially stable corporate enterprise, she finds herself staring at a silver façade. A man is typing on his computer when he feels her staring. Uncomfortable, he gets up and tightens the shades until he can no longer see her face.

***

The man returns to his computer typing something so nonsensical that he wants to spit in his own face—a suicide letter to the CEO of the company who has left him with a dead-end job, divorced because of the workload, and with a daughter who refuses to answer his phone calls.

The letter read:

Dear Bill Cobselty,

You are the biggest piece of shit in the world. You do nothing but demean the lives of others by having them slave away for your corporate approval. You spend you days on the golf course, sipping whiskey, while a Mexican man who makes ten times less than me walks around with your golf clubs who you have flicked lit cigars at. You, sir, are a vile piece of shit that needs to die. I will set fire to your house after I set fire to this shithole of a building. And the best part is, you will have never seen it coming. You don’t even know who I am. It’s funny. We went to school together and you wouldn’t even know it even if you looked me in the eye. You are cheating on your wife with the Secretary, Olive, on the third floor that you’ve made sit on the color scanner and have threatened to fire if she didn’t comply with your beastly needs. And the IT Dep.’s Executive Assistant, Melanie, who you’ve deep throated until she’s vomited all over the freshly steamed carpets in your office. You spend your afternoons in your personal bathroom taking hour-long shits after you’ve eaten a steak that has been hand-delivered and freshly cooked by the Japanese woman that you hired only to make your lunch. On Thursday’s you have her make you sashimi and spend those afternoons pounding your dick deep into her asshole after she’s spent a quarter of her time cooking for you. She bows to you when you’re finished and leaving with cum on her back and a bloody rectum. I know only because I spend time with each and every single one of them. We are plotting against the fall of your empire and the rise of our own.

We’re taking every single dime.

--From Accounting.

The man turns from his computer and peeks out from his cubicle. He whispers quietly to himself and twitches from a bit of paranoia. Animosity shrouds his face. “Big brother is always watching.”

He grabs his external hard-drive from his bag and plugs it to the USB port, saves the file and deletes it completely from his work-computer. Powering down for the day. He stands up and leers through the blinds of his window. The woman isn’t looking anymore, but the instant she turns to the movement of his fingers he swiftly lets go and exhales in fear.

***

She had earlier suffered from a panic attack after finding that her father had been stabbed by a man at a restaurant during dinner. Her mother cried hysterically over the phone up until the point that she couldn’t hear anymore. Being accustomed to blood and gore as a nurse, it’s usually not the thing to make her collapse headfirst onto the E.R. floor, something about it seemed so foreign. An I.V. impaled into the vein on her forearm, electrodes plastered to intimately covered skin, the smell of something foul beyond the curtain next to her. She removes all her hospital accessories and redresses in her scrubs.

She won’t be staying in a hospital bed, not while people need her. It’s the only way to get through the day until her mother calls her back with good news or even more horrible news. They live states apart and she can’t afford to miss a day at work just to check on her possibly alive yet possibly dying father. He never cared much for puncture wounds any way. He was a strong man, she was sure he’d make it out of it. Alive.

She clears herself from the infirmary by signing the medical chart on the end of her bed.

--“The patient suffered a minor episodic seizure. Patient is stable.

She has no rigor or shaking chills.

Discharged status: (signed) Amelia Nelwart”

She walks past the curtain and sees a woman who is sleeping. Her food has been left untouched and she has shat herself. She calls for nurse and requests that she be cleaned immediately. Amelia is a head nurse at the hospital that is next to the powerhouse. She is prone to anxiety attacks due to ridiculous hours and the intensity of injured people who arrive unaccounted for. She goes back to work. She can’t take a day off, not today, and not for her father, but she is forced to. No nurse or doctor is unaware of her attack and she is sent home for the day.

She cannot protest and leaves. Her bag is light, it carries her wallet and a water bottle. She walks to the train station and sits on the bench.

***

The man is sitting on the bench when a woman in purple scrubs approaches. He lowers his head and glares at her from the corner of his eye. He clenches his jaw as if he may say something he shouldn’t and rubs the bottom of his loafer against the concrete of the station.

***

They’re both outside. The wind is howling like any other day. Chicago. Gloomy. They’re simply in the same space with pounds of thoughts on their minds. The man is schizophrenic and hasn’t taken his medication since his wife left him for another woman. The woman suffers from epilepsy. As a child, she was thrown down a flight of stairs by a little boy that lived in her old apartment building. The two have never met before. The man nor the woman realize that they have seen each other.

***

The woman stares at the man for a moment and then releases her view to watch for the arriving train. As she stands a packet of gum falls from her pocket, she doesn’t notice it because the train is too loud for her to hear it.

The man picks it up and slips it into his bag. He wants to give it to her but believes that she can do without it. Something about her makes him want to speak.

She waits for the train to open the doors and gets on. She files into the crowd of people and effortlessly disappears.

The man waits. He waits for the right moment to give her the pack of gum back but hesitates when he realizes the train she has gotten on to isn’t his train. He finds her staring at him from the window of the car. Her gaze, almost impenetrable. The doors close and open and close again. The man stands just as the train is taking off. He remembers her eyes.