A Long Wait in the Churchyard

We read the dissertation of the serpent as the sun fell, then we went out for a drink.

Hollowed nerves.

A(n) caterpillar.

Oracle.

The doctor turned his horror head, swinging his gaze at once in an arc, from the broken knees of the lady held down in the gurney, toward the tearful driver that’d dragged her in almost as if the woman had been in protest. His sultry yellow eyes bled the light from the hall, and for a moment there was just those two bright beads of jaundice, bellowing out like the toll of a grave bell. The driver sunk to his knees and wept at the foot of the doctor, whose spine had begun to coil as his lips curled. He snarled at the driver - a taxi cab operator - and reached out with a claw much like the talon of a rare, extinct bird, crushing the driver’s shoulder. Blood filled the doctor’s fist and soaked that half of the driver’s shirt.

I hung about on the stairwell that led from the lobby to the second floor, fingering the trigger of the firearm in my jacket pocket, waiting to hear from the doctor.

Hot water ran into the sink for three or so minutes before I noticed the steam lessening, but the worms in the sink were still prevalent, still squiggling. Clutching a half bar of soap that I’d found in a crevice between one of the other sinks and an inert bloodbag-stand, I dug my fingernails into it and started scrubbing under the waning heat of the water, trying not to touch the puddle at the bottom of the sink with all the little worms in it, squiggling around, left over from a back-up in the hospital pipes.

We reached for the same bottle in the medicine cabinet and I blushed, stepping back to offer you first pick. We overheard some nurses in the next room talking to one another while we were looking through the medications. “I don’t trust them,” one voice whispered very audibly. The other one, just as audible yet attempting a respectable hush, added, “Well they’re the doctor’s twins, so we have no choice. We don’t have to say we saw anything.”

The better part of the graveyard shift was spent feeding the furnace with outdated notes on miscarriages and leukemia taken by doctors no longer employed by the hospital. One of the more interesting documents was a service order for the removal of a skeleton from a woman who had died from complications following surgery on her heart. One of the doctors’ notes said “Shapely” underneath the confirmation of the completed work order.

After the disheartening discovery of my office door having been pried open sometime during the night and the locks smashed well beyond repair, I moved my things down to the hospital accounting office. Without a safe office of my own, it was just as well that I should leave the floor while the investigation was still pending and assist in sorting out the security receipts from last year with the rest of the overworked accounting staff, many of whom were not very familiar to me. I was given a small desk alongside Mary (someone that I did recognize), where the two of us were charged with restoring damaged security-cost documents, primarily in regard to preparing a fiscal budgeting system for the next two years that would both predict and accommodate the rising costs of subduing violent encounters within the hospital. Mary’s hands were shaking so badly that I called up to the cafeteria for some coffee and muscle relaxants for her. Her long hair fell in front of her face, hanging there motionlessly until the pills could arrive. Once they did, she parted it down the middle like the curtains of a movie screen, lay one of the pills delicately over the pointed tip of her tongue, then leaned back to swallow it down with a sip of coffee.