Suspended In Dusk Read Free

her radial pulse. Barely there and so slow. I let my mind pass through my touch, search out the decay and failing organs, take the shadows of her dying softly into myself. I can’t cure her, but I can collect the scourge, its malice.
    A dark stain spreads into me and I store it away.
     
    * * *
     
    The day goes slowly and quietly. It’s usually quiet here, except those moments when someone cries out, sudden terror giving voice to weakened lungs as they momentarily face their mortality without the softening armour of fatigue or drugs. Or the howls of grief, sometimes from friends and family, sometimes from the sick themselves. Sometimes both.
    I clean up Kathy Parsons, who’s been uncontrollably shitting viscous blood onto plastic sheets for more than a week now, check her meds. She exudes the sickly sweet, cloying odour of death. She’s terrified. Only forty-eight years old, eyes always wide in child-like fear, but she’s got a little while to go yet. A little while to reach some kind of acceptance, though not all of them do. Some are gasping in disbelieving horror, even with their last breath. Almost everyone dies scared, especially the young ones. Some people are calm and accepting, content as they drift away, but they’re rare, usually very old. Everyone has time to think as they lie here, suspended in the last darkening hours of their life. It’s good that some find peace in that mortal dusk.
    I reassure Kathy as much as possible, sit with her as a sedative soaks through her struggling veins.
    Edie’s pulse is almost gone when I check her again an hour later, breaths so far apart every one seems certain to be her last. I call her son to tell him he needs to get here, but his phone goes to voicemail. I leave a message imploring him to hurry if he can.
    I pull the chair up beside her bed and take her fingers in my palms, rest my forehead against the back of her hand. Her frailty wafts into me and I soak it up, gather that insipid, creeping death into my cells. It can’t hurt me. I don’t know why, but it can’t. So I collect it. I don’t know why I do that either. Because I can. It doesn’t heal them or ease their suffering, but at some level I like to think they know I share their pain and that offers some subconscious solace.
    Edie’s pulse weakens until I can’t feel it any more. Her breaths are tiny, sharp intakes, almost imperceptible, more than ten seconds apart. Her exhalations are silent, air leaking from lungs little more than deflated sacks of inert offal.
    Fifteen seconds apart. She’s going.
    Her life leaks into the air and the shadow of her sickness, her fear and loneliness, washes through me and she’s gone. I shudder with the gift she’s given me. My hands tremble as I stand and move away to mark her chart, dimness swimming behind my eyes.
    Her son is hurrying along the hallway to her room as I emerge and his face falls when he sees me.
    “I missed her?”
    “I’m sorry. Only just. She passed moments ago. But she didn’t wake again since this morning.”
    He barks an uncontrollable sob and tears tumble over his cheeks. We’re all five years old when our mothers die. “I can see her?”
    “Of course.”
    I’ll send the counsellor down with the relevant pamphlets after he’s had some time alone with her.
     
    * * *
     
    Not much else happens through the day, which pleases me. It’s terrible when more than one patient dies in a day, as the first one feels somehow cheated of their time in my mind.
    Jake is parked outside when I get home, an embarrassed smile twitching his lips. “Hi.”
    I’m so pleased he’s there. “Hi.” I had wondered if I might not see him again. Our few faltering dates that led to our first night together had been cautious but full of hope. When something got in his way last night, I worried it would frighten him off.
    “Try again?” he says, holding up a bottle of red.
    “I’d really like that. I have some steaks in the fridge and wait till you try my