“Dad was certain a jury would find him not guilty. And he was right. But then you come around. You convicted, sentenced, and executed a man who never hurt anyone in his life.”
Belk was squatting beside me now, down on one knee. The mag, steady in his hand, its muzzle at my right temple, would leave nothing but a bloody stump above my neck.
“Maybe you were a good cop once. Maybe you even eliminated a few monsters from the world when you first started playing Divine Reaper.” He bumped the cold muzzle against my skin. “Look at me.”
I looked up into the face of a murderer and knew that I was his first kill.
“What goes around...” he said, and pulled the trigger.
Copyright ©2008 Chris Rogers
The Proper Application of Pressure to a Wound
by Sherry Decker
I was tempted to squat right there in front of God and everybody and piss on Jesse Frenault’s grave — except I doubt God cares about things like that, and what the hell, all the other mourners were already gone. Unbuttoning my wool coat, lifting my long, black skirt, and peeling down my pantyhose would have been a struggle wasted on the squirrels.
The branches of a giant maple sheltered the new grave. The November winds had stripped most of the leaves already, but a steady trickle of amber leaves whirled and rustled down around me. It wouldn’t be long before the grave was covered and the only thing to suggest the thoughtless old buzzard was buried there was his modest gravestone. I leaned forward, planning to spit on the arched marble, but couldn’t work up enough saliva to even swallow, much less spit.
“You poor old fart,” I said. Another leaf brushed my shoulder and spiraled down to decorate more of the fresh, russet dirt.
After taking care of him for three straight years most days and nights, he didn’t leave me a red cent. He left it all to his lazy ass son who had come home to visit him once during his last year on earth. His son’s name was Vincent Reginald Frenault, and he spent more time following me around, accidentally stroking my rear, than spending time with his dying father. I felt like saying, “Here, dammit, Vincent, you hold your old man’s sticky pecker while he takes a leak since you’re so keen to help out.” Vincent would have fired me on the spot, though, and I needed the job. After being put on probation from the hospital for mouthing off to a doctor I was lucky to have a nursing job at all. I’ve made some sad decisions in my life.
I had been in a sound sleep when Jesse’s bell started clanging. I went tearing next door, zipping up the front of my robe as I ran, hopping from one foot to the other and pulling my slippers on over my heels. I found Jesse upright in bed, the first time he had sat up by himself in six months. It must have been sheer terror that gave him enough strength in those stick-thin arms and in his gnarled, age-spotted hands twisted by arthritis. He grabbed my arm as soon as I reached the side of his bed. His blind eyes were like mottled green grapes ready to burst from too much juice. I thought he was having a seizure by the way he jerked from side to side. Beneath his thin blue gown, open down the front, his rib cage heaved like a bellows.
I felt his bald head and clammy brow. “No fever. You in pain?”
“I can’t...” he said. Almost a quart of blood shot from his toothless mouth like water from a fire hose, all over my arm and hand and the bedcovers. He toppled forward, his face landing in the gelatinous puddle on the bedspread. I lifted his head and saw thick yellow mucous bubble from both nostrils. Blood and mucous make me queasy — a bizarre flaw for a nurse. I often wonder, what’s in those lumps and smears? I half expected to see something moving in that puddle.
I pulled him back on his pillows and dialed 911 even though I knew he was dead. Vincent slept through it all.
Jesse was more pathetic than hateful, so I’m glad I didn’t squat on his grave. It’s just that I was counting on him to leave me something in his will, considering all the care I gave him. He said I was the best nurse he’d ever had and that I was “quite outspoken.” Or, did he say I was “awfully free with my opinion”? Anyway, he liked me to read to him at bedtime. I didn’t mind. It felt good to look up every page or so and see him resting on his pile of pillows with his clean face and hair and his clean bedding. I bathed him every evening after dinner and slid him between fresh laundered sheets. It was the only time he didn’t smell like a shitty diaper or like a moldy old refrigerator hauled off and left at the garbage dump. Old refrigerators have their own unique smell, as if forty years of curdled milk, rancid meat, moldy fruit, and cheese had permeated their walls. A person can scrub until she is exhausted and the refrigerator walls are raw from her scouring, but that stink hangs on. Jesse smelled like that, like an old, moldy refrigerator, propped up and abandoned at the garbage dump.
“You’re welcome to stay on,” Vincent told me the morning the coroner picked up his father’s body.
“For what?”
“I might need some tender loving care once in a while.” Vincent sounded quite serious, but the expression on his face made me want to jam my palm up against the end of his nose real hard, driving the nasal bone into his frontal lobes. A lobotomy, compliments of the private nurse.
Instead, I picked up my medical bag and my suitcase and headed for the door.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” he called after me.
One year earlier I would have shouted something appropriate over my shoulder, but I’ve learned from my unhappy experience at the hospital that saying nothing demonstrates restraint and it leaves them wondering what you would have said if they were worth the spit and air it takes to say it.
Hospital Special Services added my name to their list again and promised to call as soon as they found something “fitting.”
“If possible, no terminal cases this time please,” I said.
The counselor nodded and then shook her head. Everybody wants the same thing, a patient who isn’t dying. We all want someone who will get well or at least stabilize.
“I’ll call as soon as we do a needs-comparison,” she said. That meant she would scrape the bottom of the barrel before she found something for me.
Three of my patients died during my last month at the hospital. One of them was a middle-aged woman in the final stages of cancer, so her death wasn’t unexpected. She just slipped away while I held her hand. One minute there was the light of life in her eyes, a look of awareness, resignation, peace, and a moment later she was gone. She didn’t blink or look away. She faded out, like a flashlight with a weak battery.
There was an eight-year-old boy who had found his father’s loaded target pistol and shot himself right through the ears. He looked fine, like we could wipe off the blood and plug the holes with cotton swabs where his inner ears had been and send him home. I squeezed his mother’s hand as he took his last breath. Her knees gave way and I caught her before she hit the floor.
I’ve always heard that doctors and nurses make the worst patients. It’s true. Dr. Everson was in his mid forties and as healthy looking as any athlete.
Rumor had it, one day he discovered a lump on his knee. He didn’t wait for the test results. Instead, he entered and locked the door of an examination room and injected himself with a syringe full of air while I banged on the door and peered through a gap in the blinds. The emergency team broke the glass and unlocked the door, but they failed to revive him. He died alone in the stark room beneath a faulty overhead light flickering off and on. Not the kind of place I would choose to end it all.