“Listen, Sonia,” Karen from Human Resources says. “We’re just a little
concerned about what’s been happening with you.”

Karen from Human Resources is not dressed for the hospital, and keeps
picking at her sleeves, tugging them down. This happens when the office
workers come onto the floor, underestimating how cold it is, how blue in
the lips we all are.

Karen from Human Resources is the one who suggested I have a check-in with
the nurse manager and the charge nurse. But since the nurse manager and the
charge nurse are chronically overworked, understaffed, and under
caffeinated, it’s just me and Karen.

I have met Karen once before, at a particularly unpleasant ambush by the
hospital’s administration, when I was transitioned from Maternity to ER.
This was because there was a shortage of ER nurses and an influx of
overdoses, and also because I couldn’t stop weeping while assisting during
Cesareans.

There’s a spot of something on my scrub pants. I hope it isn’t shit. I
check under my fingernails, and don’t find anything. I must have brushed up
against a patient. Still, I try to wipe my hands, as subtle as possible,
with the inside of my scrub top.

“What you’re doing in the NICU is…worrisome.”

Karen seems particularly twitchy today, and keeps eyeing me funny under her
turtleshell glasses, keeps looking at my hands. They’ve gotten rough from
scrub-ins, palms turned to sandpaper. Clean to the point of being raw.

“In the NICU,” I repeat.

“Yes,” Karen says, cleaning her glasses. “What you’re doing with the
babies.”

#

If you walk the border between the South End and Dorchester, where the
highway might as well be a chain link fence; if you go on a Tuesday
afternoon, when the Boston Medical ER clinic has their walk in hours; if
you speed through Blue Hill Ave with your windows rolled up and your heart
tightly wound; if you follow the line of sewage and drain pipe they call
the poor man’s Charles— if you do these things, you will find a place once
called something else, but now called Methadone Mile.

It is inhabited by shopping carts and tarps and barefoot girls with slices
of moon between where their shirts end and their pants begin. Boys who sit
cross legged, shooting up between the creases of their feet. By sleeping
bags and crossword puzzles, with Capri-Sun pouches and condom wrappers
glinting like a flash of garden snake. Inhabited by needles and needles and
needles.

I used to hold seminars to register the medical professionals who live here
to administer Narcan. There are not enough doctors, nurses, therapists,
counselors, addiction specialists, social workers for all the needles. OD
Duty, it’s called at work. Narcan is administered indiscriminately— on the
Orange Line to girls that could be your daughter, at the Roxbury Crossing
stop to men that could be your father. One pump per nostril— a shift in the
planets and instant withdrawal.

But few doctors and none of the hospital administrators will get
registered, too scared of the scabbed up leftovers of the person who was
once pre-heroin. Too scared, they say, but there little difference for me
anymore, between fear and selfishness.

I’d smile with teeth and tell them that this is their choice, their choice
to not carry the nasal spray, not to get the certificate. It is their
choice to watch someone die— because they will, I’d tell them. They will
see it on the T, on the 39 bus, in the patch of grass outside the Museum of
Fine Arts, huddled under a sleeping bag in the Common. They will see it: a
slip of focus, a slide from ninety-eight degrees to something colder,
unmeasurable—

Anyway, I’m not allowed to give the Narcan seminars anymore.

#

I start to visit the NICU after I have my first OD in the emergency room.
It’s my second day in the rotation, and I’m still shadowing one of the
nurse managers, Julie, who is in charge of making sure my transition from
Maternity goes smoothly. She’s obviously heard of me, since she gets
nervous whenever I get near a suture kit.

Julie keeps repeating how ER is going to be really good for me, how I’ll be
a good fit, how they don’t have a lot of bilingual nurses down here, but
they do get a lot of Dominicans. Without insurance, she
feels the need to point out. My eyebrow rises of its own accord
and her smile falters.

“It’s so hard to get a patient history from them,” she says. “But now I
have you!”

“I’m not Dominican,” I offer, unhelpfully.

Julie looks deeply uncomfortable, clearly trying to stop herself from
asking the infamous what are you, then?, when one of my patients
codes.

He had come in early that night, an older white man, with lots of scruff
and demeanor of someone who was once very handsome, heavy on the ma’ams and please. Most my patients here are white, a
byproduct of years of medical racism— I’ve realized Hispanic and Black
patients are much less likely to develop opiate addictions, due to never
having been prescribed painkillers, due to their pain not being taken
seriously.

This man came from the Pine Street Inn, largest men’s shelter in Boston,
complaining of chest pains, because if you complain of chest pains in an
ER, we legally have to admit you, as to not risk the astronomical
settlement of a lawsuit in which a patient has a heart attack inside a
hospital and is not treated.

However, some of the Methadone Mile residents have learned this, and it has
become code-speak for,

can I stay here for the night? I’ve gotten kicked out from the shelter
because I’m using.

And I don’t always have the heart to say, no. To call security, to send
them out into a Boston winter, to see them tomorrow, when I tell them I’m sorry sir, you will not be able to keep these toes.

So, I searched him for needles, which he consented to, and I had Bandit,
The World’s Worst Drug Sniffing Dog, give him a once over. Bandit has won
Employee of the Month five times at the hospital. Bandit also once missed
someone with almost a pound of heroin shoved in their ass, because he was
busy eating a patient’s meatloaf. I am of the unpopular opinion Bandit
should be put down.

This guy turned out clean, or so I thought, and he was dehydrated, as most
are. I started him a banana bag line and handed him some red-flavoured
Jello and didn’t think much of it. I charted the banana bag I gave him, and
that he would probably enter withdrawal and need methadone, for the next
nurse.

Julie has been really into the charting, even for things like saline and
fluids.

We need to be able to provide cohesive care between shifts and we can’t
do that without charting everything! Charting band-aids could save a
life!

Julie is really big on the “we” language.

He codes, despite my charting, because he injected his banana bag IV with
fentanyl, which he got past my pat down. The fentanyl means he has passed
being able to feel the effects of heroin, which means he has passed being
able to feel regular injections, which means in the desperate move of
injecting his IV line, he will die.

I know this and Julie knows this, and since we both fucking know this, I
just breeze right past her, walk to the elevator and hit six and she calls,
“Sonia? Sonia?” or maybe “Code! Code!” because those things have started
sounding the same to me.

I go up to Maternity, and I must seem really placid, because everyone
smiles and asks me how I am feeling, and I smile and say I’m wonderful,
really liking ER, “Sonia? Sonia?” or maybe “Code! Code!” ringing in the
space between my ears.

I let myself into the NICU and the sweet milk smell washes over me. I get
my face really close the the incubators, so I can feel the heat on my
cheek. My favorite is a preemie, the Griffith baby, who is almost ready to
be released. She has gotten big, and wriggles on her own, and her once blue
eyes have settled to an intelligent brown. I open the incubator and she
looks up at me, curious. Picking her up, I feel every one of her wishbone
ribs. I breathe her in, fill my lungs with her. Starving, big gulps. Get so
close I get sebum on the tip of my nose.

It is better than any antiseptic or decontamination shower and I feel
clean, clean, clean.

#

I stop sleeping in beds, after my divorce. I sleep slumped at the kitchen
counter, or on my yoga mat, or on on-call cots. I sleep on the bus, so
strangers are always waving their swollen fingers in front of me and saying miss, miss, what’s your stop, along with some other things I
pretend to sleep through. It’s a tightrope though; pretend to sleep for too
long, and you get a hand on your thigh.

I sleep on waiting room sofas and on the bathroom tile and in the supply
closet at work. I sleep for the half-life of a heartbeat, always wrapped
around things, contorted, my dead-weight legs seeking something, twining
with blankets— a caduceus. Always reaching.

But mostly, I lie awake thinking of scuttling cockroaches and unfurling
snakes, thinking mostly of their unarmored bellies— unprotected, really
just worms. Spend the nights cleaning under my fingernails with bleach
wipes, until I hear my roommate pad into the kitchen before the sunrise,
stethoscope around her neck.

The morning news rattles off tragedies, telling us it’s an epidemic, as if we didn’t already fucking know.

“You look like shit,” Lisa says. Lisa is also divorced and also a nurse.
Our two-bedroom in Jamaica Plain is crumbling, but only three train stops
from work. She is always trying to give me some of her Ambien, because a
tired nurse is a dangerous nurse.

“You should get some sleep.”

I should, I think, I should quit at the hospital and throw a syringe in
Karen’s face like a dartboard, and slip away in the river Lethe, alongside
all the infants whose mothers lost the grip on their ankles, or maybe, that
was a different river.

“How have they not fired me,” I ask Lisa constantly.

“I think it’s actually impossible to get fired,” Lisa says. “You’d have to
like, shoot someone.”

I head down Child Street, each dead, soggy leaf under my sneaker a
goldfish, eyes bulging, taking pleasure at how they pop under my weight.
Outside my building, babies are already gurgling on the patios; girls
crooning at them in garbled Spanish with long black hair dripping down
their backs in oil slicks. Their voices are rough with worry and exhaustion
and a bit of smoke. Hushed, careful not to disturb the children. There is
no playground in Jamaica Plain, so little girls with flyways that I yearn
to tuck and smooth weave between the old furniture that lines the street,
climbing through the bars of balconies like a ribcage.

Back to the ER, where I will let myself dissolve until I disappear into the
vents. Where I will make infinite beds with hospital corners that will
reject my bones should I try to lay them there. Flip it, strip it, starch
the sheets.

#

After the OD, after walking off the floor, I mostly get sent to do blood
draws. Give out pudding cups or cans of Shasta, an off-brand ginger soda
that tastes like piss, but is safe for diabetics. I’m not allowed to start
any lines. Julie even watches me take vitals, as if I’m going to hang
myself with my stethoscope.

“I’m going to hang myself with my stethoscope,” I tell her, to get a
reaction, but all I get are her big old cowhide eyes, and a please don’t say things like that, Sonia.

#

After meeting with Human Resources Karen, I really do try to stop
going to Maternity. Or at least, the on call nurses get really good about
not letting me slip in with the cleaning crew.

Instead, I fuck a trauma resident for the first time in the wound care
supply closet, with the master key and my compression sock hanging from one
foot, trailing— the grey sigh of an airplane.

He’s pretty like this, teeth crunching together.

I am so small; my wingspan, a pair of men’s hands on my waist. So tired;
the bruises under my eyes began to look like warpaint.

During, I think of something beautiful. A cornflower. A seahorse. A
perfect, white puff of exhaust from a school bus.

He asks if we can go get dinner. I demure.

Lisa tells me I’m ready to start dating. I tell Lisa she can go fuck
herself.

I fuck him again and again until I can’t stand to look at him. The
desperation is too thick on his tongue, cornstarch. Piano turns to
percussion, and I can only picture weeds during sex, ugly things.
Centipedes, twisted motorcycles, fish choked with red tide, the algae
growing over their eyes. My body, soft and weak and terrible.

I don’t want to do this anymore,
I say. The trauma resident looks hurt and doleful and I am reminded of
Bandit, The World’s Worst Drug Sniffing Dog, and I want to shoot him
between the eyes.

I can’t explain how it’s wine left open too long, so I just slide my
sneakers on, not bothering to fix the tongues.

I pick up some Plan B from the pharmacy, because I haven’t been careful.
There’s a big advertisement for a master cleanse supplement, claiming to
show me how to clean myself from the inside out.

#

After a particularly bad shift in which a patient i’m giving a sponge bath
to tried to stick his thumbs into my eyeballs, I swipe one of the Maternity
nurse’s keycards off her scrubs. They’ve made sure mine doesn’t work for
the NICU anymore. I ply the overnight on-call nurse, who is in her
residency, with my old NCLEX flashcards, and she’s bent over her desk,
silently moving her lips, mouth-fucking words like spondylolysis
and hematochezia. She’s got a heap of shiny hair piled on her head
in a ponytail.

I remember how it was,
I tell her. I got this. I’m on break!

She says thank you and I show her my teeth in response. Of course, of course.

The Griffith baby is gone, healthy enough to return home and I close my
eyes to mourn her for a little bit. Get big. Go get big and strong.

The incubators are moaning their low moan, and the infants are fidgetly
tonight. There are a few new ones, in the back row, and the others sense
that. Know that something is wrong.

Instead of Baby Carson or Baby Hernandez, the fussiest newcomer is Baby
Doe. A shrivelly thing, toes mottled, eyes unfocused. Not big enough to
move, but shaking— barely a tremor, as if something were breathing over
her, sending little ripples through her skin. Fussing, a cry higher and
more inhuman than the others. A cry like fisher cats fighting, like the
snap of chicken bones.

There have been countless other Baby Does. I used to give them infant sized
amounts of methadone and my knuckles to suck on.

The other babies begin to whimper as Baby Doe gets louder, and the on-call
nurse shakes her little ponytail, clearly annoyed.

I put on gloves. Open the incubator. I lift Baby Doe, who is so light that
her heart must weigh barely an ounce, no more than a peach pit. She’s still
unfocused, but you can tell she’s really trying to turn her head. Really
trying to see me.

I whisper in the pinky-nail sized shell of her ear. I’ve got you.

#

Lisa comes home that night and goes straight into the shower. I follow, sit
on the toilet to pack a glass bowl with green stripes woven through like
Medusa’s head. My own hair is still wet and is beginning to freeze.
Earlier, I got home, exhausted from doing sponge baths, from lifting and
repositioning and wiping. The festering had followed me and I sat in the
shower for hours, using our meager supply of hot water, the steam pressing
against the frozen windows, leaving a gasp of heat on the glass.

All of Jamaica Plain is shivering; the heat feels especially reluctant
lately, and utilities in Boston neighborhoods are categorized by need, so
naturally Jamaica Plain, poor and brown and dotted with red-brick projects,
comes last.

“Fuck,” Lisa mumbles from under the water, which steams as soon as it comes
in contact with the air but quickly turns cold, worn out after hours of
use. “Can’t you— ?”

“Can’t turn on the space heater without shorting the power.”

“Fuck.”

“How’d it go?”

“Did my first post-mortem.”

I am sympathetic. After my first post-mortem, I almost puked out my
intestines, spewed out something tangible, something that came up over the
brim of the toilet bowl, strange and yellow and charring my throat. Lisa is
lucky to have come so far without doing one.

“You think the worst part is going to be the eyes, right?” she calls, skin
getting pinker and pinker from the cold. “But it’s the mouth. You can’t get
it to close.”

Procedure says: Use your thumb to close the eyes. With white cloth ties,
secure the jaw and head. This is so the face won’t be frozen, gaping; this
is so the soul won’t get stuck in the throat.

Cross the wrists. Ties the ankles. Clean the shit. There’s always shit.

“Don’t flip them,” I warn, rueful. “The bile comes out.”

Green, green, green; a glimpse of mid-August under sprinklers, spilled on
the cot.

“I couldn’t open a window.”

This is a thing for Lisa. Before we moved in together, she aired the place
out for a week, let in all sorts of bugs. Tried to remove any trapped souls
from the house.

“Of course you can’t.” The hospital windows, like much else, are for show.

“Throw a chair through it.” She shivers, and the room is filled with the
clacking of her teeth. “If I die, throw a chair.”

I don’t tell her that Boston Medical has bulletproof windows. That after a
doctor was shot by a patient, they sealed them. That a lot of things
happened, as a result of that, but the one that affected the nurses the
most, was that everything was sealed and we could no longer pop our heads
out for an illegal smoke. That if you die, your soul is trapped like
dissolvable tablets, like confessions, folded up in the space under your
tongue.

She faces the showerhead and splutters as I smoke until I finally say,that’s enough, sharp, disturbed at this form of penance from her. Stop waterboarding yourself, I say, and I hand her a mildewy
towel. I offer her half a Percocet and we share her bed. She drifts off
right away, but I hold off for as long as I can, stubborn against the drug,
watching her exhales spiral and dissolve. This is something I used to do
with my husband, in our shitty sublet in Dorchester, with terrible heating. It’s okay, baby, he’d say. I’ll keep you warm. Or
something like that.

It is so cold your breath could walk away from you.

#

Sometimes, if my sleeplessness reaches days, I start to see the before. I
am awake and alive and also not those things. I am sitting in the
cafeteria, or fetching syringes, and somehow I am also in the before; in
the breakroom, with the blue sheet cake and the pointy paper hats and the
diaper contest. Surrounded by grinning slices of mouth, belonging to the
other faceless figures in scrubs. Sometimes my husband is there. I never
see him, but I feel a familiar hot clutch at my back. Sometimes I am in the
Maternity breakroom, or the Operating Room, or the crawl space under my
childhood porch, where we found the rotting remainders of what once was our
cat. Wherever we are, I do not understand why they are throwing this party
for me, the husk, the exoskeleton, the mollusk that has been sucked dry.

When my vision clarifies, I feel as if have snapped in on myself like a
rubber band. I have to put a hand on my terminally flat stomach and remind
myself: you are not in the before.

#

Used needles jam a snow plow. This is so ridiculous it sounds made up, like
a call out of work excuse. But there it is, coming out of the mouth of some
blond lady with chicklets for teeth on Channel 5. Julie says I can stay
home, and my eye twitches at the relief in her voice. No sweat, I
tell her. Coming in won’t be a problem. I use my BMC Emergency
Personnel Card and I get a police escort to work. The cop says,my ma was a nurse. And I say, wow, you must be well adjusted.

I treat twenty-three mild cases of frostbite. No one else has come in. I
almost cut off a finger on the last one, purple and blue like an oil slick.
It’s really not too bad, but I’m fucking bored.

I’m just about to finger the scalpel, which I not technically allowed to
touch, when I am accosted by Julie. She is babbling something and flapping
her hands, gesturing to a younger guy, scraggly and wearing pajama pants
over his snow boots.

“Can you?” she asks.

“He definitely speaks English,” I say.

“I don’t get it. What he’s trying to say.”

“He’s white.” I am reluctant to help her.

“Well I can’t understand what he’s saying, so will you please just get me
the patient’s history,” she snaps, and then recomposes, pastes on her
signature grin. Sometimes Julie impresses me, the way she can spring back.
“Please just..?”

I go. Snap on some latex gloves to cover up the tenderized flesh that was
once my hands. “Where does it hurt?” I ask him, and he just smiles at me,
all sweet and beatific.

I try again.

“Donde duele?”

Again, just a grin. I see why Julie has passed him off to me.

I get him a room temperature Shasta, press it into his palms. He drinks it
one handed, rivulets spilling down onto his white, throbbing throat. Even
though there are plenty of other patients, I sit with him, the papery
privacy curtains half-drawn. When he is done, he struggles with the laces
on his too big boots.

He has a full needle in his palm, and is not doing a good job of hiding it.
I already knew, but seeing it makes me flinch.

“Here,” I say. “Let me help you. Just promise not to fucking kick me.”

He laughs at this and says.

“I promise.”

And then, in what must be perfect harmony, we both go, “Thank you.”

I peel off his socks, which are wet from melting snow, and check his toes
for frostbite, of which he has none. A small miracle. No frost bite, but
there are needle marks between his toes. This is common for those with
collapsed arm veins.

I clean his feet, wipe away the leftover whispers of blood and pus and
dirt.

“It’s easier,” I tell him, my voice leaving me in a hiss. “To use your
hand. Safer.”

He has a line of freckles disappearing into his hair.

“Show me?” he asks. His hands are shaking like a windowpane. “Show me how?”

I will chart that I used a saline syringe. I will chart that I found his
vein for him, below the thick knuckle of his middle finger.

“Sonia? What are you doing?”

Julie watches on in horror.

I will not chart that it’s not an saline syringe. I will not chart that I
lied. I will not chart that if he keeps collapsing all his veins, the
chances of him overdosing with be so much higher, that some terrible things
are not preventable, that I can give him methadone now or I can give it to
him in two weeks, that he will be back and he will break my heart. I will
not chart that he pressed something else into my palm, and maybe I wanted
someone to feel safe and good.

“Is that…the patient’s needle?”

“Fuck,” I tell the boy. “That’s Julie.”

“Sonia, I think you should take a break.”

“Give me a minute.”

I squeeze the boys hands, squeeze them real hard. But he is already going,
first his body, and then his eyes.

“Sonia!”

“Jesus,” I say, “I’m fucking going,” and I go. I walk out of the hospital,
and I’m not sure if it’s morning or night but the sky is a starless maw and
I can’t see a thing.

#

I realize I’ve left my coat in the on call room about halfway down Longwood
Ave, when the cold starts to eat through my turtleneck and scrub top, each
snow flurry like a swarm of moths. I know by take a break Julie meant go
sit in the on-call room and wait to be disciplined, that Human Resources
Karen and her brethren would be called, that I’d have a hearing, that I
might be fired.

Might– the hospital is still devastatingly short on nurses, so God knows
what they’d overlook. They’d say that something traumatic had happened to
me, spout some statistics about what happens to a woman’s body, her mind,
after a loss. Give me three days of leave. They’d say something happened to
me– is there a difference, anymore, if it happened to me or if it was
something I saw and bandaged and wrote down on a clipboard? Someone I fed,
and cleaned, and closed their eyelids?

My legs lead me through the Fens, through the slush piling up from buses
and SUVs and haphazard plowing, not bothering to shake off the snow every
few steps like I normally do. By the time I get to the Ruggles stop, I’m
soaked. I pop my fingers in my mouth, a trick for avoiding frostbite, try
to cram them down my hot throat. Head down to the steaming air of the
train.

In the tunnel, on the platform there are a bunch of young girls, out too
late or maybe too early. They’re young, probably thirteen, but you can tell
they are trying to be older. One has a belly ring. Another, pink hair. The
third is chubby, baby fat, keeps yanking up her bra, looking at her breasts
like she’s forgotten they were there. She probably has. She has probably
just had her first cigarette. She probably just had her first man.

I want to smoke, my hands keep reaching for a coat pocket that’s hanging in
my hospital locker.

They’re loud, like teenage girls are, and keep looking around, like teenage
girls do, waiting on people to notice them. Belly Ring throws out words,
fuck and him strung together with ease like telephone wires. Baby Fat
starts swinging around the handrails, hitching up her skirt, linking her
stocking-clad knee around the metal. Clumsy.

Some have started looking. The men, who are up too early to be going to
jobs and too late to be coming home from them. The men who look crumpled as
straw wrappers. Tracing the legs of little Pink Hair like she’s made of wax
paper.

I want to say stop, I want say shut up, sit down, haven’t you ever seen a
man’s shake like that? Get small, make yourself a marble, a raisin, a
particle of dust, but even those still catch light. I want them to pretend
to be are glass, but it seems like here there’s only cardboard, plywood,
plastic where windows should be.

They get on the train heading towards Oak Grove. I hear them, one stop, two
stops later. Cackling, swearing, quiet. Checking if someone has seen.

I shove my mottled fingers in my pockets and start walking back.

#

I wonder if they will call a Code Pink on me.

At first, I just come back for my coat. At first, I want to get the
ponytail nurse in trouble, because I hear her talking with some of the
other residents, who are also pretty, but don’t inspire nearly as many
violent feelings in me.

“It’s horrific,” Ponytail says, smacking her lips. I picture all her
seashell teeth falling out. I want to see her, scarlet mouthed, crawling
around the floor, trying to pick them all up .

“Really, I don’t even want to tell you because you’ll wish you didn’t
know.”

“Oh, just tell me,” another one says.

I get that first-snow feel, the one you get when people are talking about
you. Like slipping on unsalted stairs. Heart-stricken, like a bird that’s
missed migration.

“You won’t be able to look at her anymore,” Ponytail warns. “If I tell
you.”

People don’t look at me, anyway– maybe it’s the charts of patients stuck
in my stare, or how I always smell like bleach on linoleum floors . People don’t look at me anymore; there is an evaporation that
happens, after hundreds of little traumas and some big ones. After waking
up with blood in some underwear, some cramping, some big old pads. Some
tiny peach pit hearts that wouldn’t restart. Some men with cool metal in
their hands and masks over their mouths— men with hands, with hands, with
hands.

People don’t want to be witnesses, and I don’t blame them. How could they
look? How could they bear it?

Whatever she does tell them, I can’t hear. Sometimes I can barely hear my
patients, with my lungs rattling about, my breath so loud, my body so big
and clumsy. I cannot bear to be inside it, this hulking, weak thing. In a
remarkable show of self-control, I don’t smack her to oblivion. I just give
her a big bump in the hallway, stomp on her sneaker-clad toes, and unhook
her ID from the bottom of her scrub shirt.

With it, I disperse a bunch of Klonopin for a phantom who I chart as
Patient X. I chew down on one, and without any water to wash it down, I
have to settle for some tooth-rotting Shasta.

I also let myself into the NICU, after a worried man pushing a worried
woman in a wheelchair. Nobody stops me when I lift Baby Doe, nobody stops
me when I hold her to my chest underneath a bunch of discarded paper-thin
gowns. Nobody sees anything, when I slip into an unused wing of the
hospital. The old Oncology unit, where that doctor was shot. Nobody,
nobody.

I hold Baby Doe, who is quiet, and it feels like soreness, as if I’m
flexing a muscle, that has been dormant. I bury my face in her, and she
begins to cry.

I try and memorize her smell. I want to forget English, Spanish, the
languages of sighs, and speak only in whispers into her neck. I sit on the
floor, underneath the shelves of empty syringes and empty bottles of
insulin, underneath the gauze and wound care. All my grains, all my fibers,
the staffs of wheat that guard my ribs, I summon their heat and I whisper please, please, please and I think that has become my favorite
prayer.

They have not sealed the windows of the old deserted Oncology wing. Why
bother? It has been abandoned, dried up, become a phantom place. I crack
one, barely open enough to shove a cigarette butt through. It is almost
morning. I can tell because everything is getting a little more grey. I can
hear the warming up, the beep-beep heart monitors of the snowplows, ready
to bury and unbury.

When the plows come, someone will find me and Baby Doe, quiet for the first
time since she was admitted to the NICU, losing some of her yellowness,
sucking on my knuckle, almost clean and ready for care, like any other
infant. When the plows come, they will swaddle her in something pink and
she will be dismantled, packed up, lived in. When the plows come, they will
find that I have expanded and expanded and expanded, like a thinning layer
of ice.