Short Story

Short Story

March 2026

“What a fucking day,” I say aloud as I unceremoniously dump my handbag, keys, dinner (takeaways – again), and (now squashed) flowers on the kitchen counter. I have yet to turn the lights on, but I’m not sure I can bring myself to give the day any more colour. It’s had enough, and so have I. I don’t need light anyway. Dinner is a burger, so I won’t need to fuck about with forks and things, and the vase is still on the drying rack from the last time I had flowers. By the time I threw them out, they weren’t flowers anymore though. The tops were dry, but the stems had turned into what I can only describe as a semi-solid smell: putrid, foaming greenish-brown strings, bobbing about like zombie celery in a bubble bath. I’d had high hopes for the ones now on my counter, but a quick glance tells me I’d be lucky to have a single undamaged sunflower. I turf them all. I cannot abide loneliness and refuse to have even that of a sunflower’s on my conscience. I hear the cat flap slam. I know cat flaps aren’t meant to slam, but George has piled on the pounds since I got the automatic food dispenser, and the only way he can get in is to run full speed at the flap and hope for the best. The slamming is when it hits the door on its way up. I turn to see him skid a little, right himself, and walk up to me as if he’s never had a graceless moment in his life. “Hello, you fat fuck,” I say with a chuckle. I pick him up and nestle my face in his fur. He smells dusty and musty and safe: alleyways, cat spit, and home. I hold him tighter as he struggles to escape, and take us both to the couch. “There you go.” I put him down. He shakes his fur and starts to groom himself. The Great Unclean has dared touch him again. How rude. I grab the remote – it’s time to Netflix and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I jolt awake as the funeral dirge rings in my ears, mere seconds after the chapel doors creaked open, the coffin appeared, and my heart broke into a million pieces. God, I hate this dream. It’s been 12 years and it haunts me to this day. George eyes me suspiciously. One ear back and the WTF scowl. He hates this dream too. “Come, boy, let’s give you some food.” That perks him right up. Any treat that doesn’t come from the dispenser is his most favourite treat of all time. He’s munching away before I can even move the spoon out his way. “Glutton.” I look to the window. It’s earlier than I thought. Not much point in going to bed now though, it would just add the chore of remaking it. I head back to the couch, then decide on coffee instead. Getting to the hospital early would actually do me – and the patients – good. Since Covid hit, we’ve been inundated with patients all presenting the same symptoms: fever, shortness of breath, and fear. All cleaned up and heading for the door, I chuck the last bit of cold coffee down my gullet and annoy George with a big kiss on his forehead. I’m repaid with his paw lick groom. “I love you too, asshole.” The train is eerily empty. Only emergency services are permitted to use public transport, and there are very few of us who aren’t at the hospitals already. Until last night, I hadn’t been home in three days. Hence the automatic food dispenser. I am fraught with guilt every time I leave poor George at home, and then I remember that I don’t grace him with my company, he graces me with his. I don’t think he really feels lonely. At least not the tumbleweed blowing across a deserted town kind of lonely. Not like I do. The train grinds to a halt, jolting me from my reverie. Doors opening. Mind the gap! Doors opening. Mind the gap! I walk through the doors, mind the gap, and head up the stairs into cloud and rain. No surprises there. Fortunately, the hospital is just two blocks down. I walk past several people who are crying, and I don’t need to guess why. They need to be admitted but there’s no room at the inn. They glare at me in my nurse’s uniform, and I can’t tell if they blame me or pity me, or if they’re simply annoyed that I get to go in where they don’t. This pandemic has truly knocked us on our asses. Inside the hospital, it’s much worse. Eyes are no longer glaring – they’re pleading. There’s the sound of gasping interspersed with the psssh of respirators, and the incessant beeping of the vital sign monitors. Those that can muster the energy reach out when we walk past. For what, I don’t know. Help? Hope? It’s amazing how utterly alone everyone is in this overcrowded space. I watch as they wheel out a patient who has just passed, and I say a silent prayer for her undoubtedly devastated family. We won’t see them, of course. No one will. I do my rounds checking oxygen, pulses, and the will to live. None of them is looking good. A body in here today is a cadaver out there tomorrow. Our mortuaries are full to the brim with corpses, three atop each other – they simply cannot incinerate them fast enough. They also can’t refrigerate them all, so the smell of decomposing flesh surrounds the building like a wall. I know there’s no other option, but I can’t help but think that this is surely the quickest way to cultivate even more disease. I watch as they wheel two more from my ward. They were next in line for the ICU but simply couldn’t hang on for the ventilator. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the lucky ones. I can feel the panic rise in the remaining patients – what if we’re next? Beds fill as quickly as they empty, and not even five minutes pass before they wheel the next lot in. Next thing I know, two days have blurred past and I’m heading home once again. With a takeaway and some flowers. Again. I should probably give it up at some point, but old habits die hard. John liked having fresh flowers in the house. Particularly near the end. He said it added the life he was lacking. I think of the cancer like a game of Tetris. It began quite slowly, and we felt quite in control. Then it picked up the pace, and we started to scramble a bit. In the end, pieces were just falling and falling and soon there was no room left to breathe. Literally none. The cancer filled his lungs until he suffocated to death. I see his face in every patient these days. The fear, the helplessness. I try to help them like I tried to help him, but I know it is all in vain. The pieces are falling, and I just can’t keep up. George is waiting for me at the door. I wonder if he’s finally gotten too fat for the flap. “Sorry, my boy. I promise I’ll be home more often soon.” We both know I’m lying. I open the door and he runs in ahead of me. None of this ‘ladies first’ business here. Today I turn on the light to stave off some of the darkness in my head. I give George a bowl full of wet food and myself one of fast food, and we settle in for our night on the couch. I hope to God that I don’t have the dream again, and somehow, He answers my prayers. Rather than reliving John’s death, I’m flashing on all the beautiful memories of us together: holding hands in the store, laughing at stupid shit ‘til we’re in tears, playfully arguing over whom George loves the most (it was him). I wake up with a gaping hole in my heart. God, I miss him so much. He was my heart and my soul and there are days that I can’t breathe for longing to hold him just one more time. Today is one of those days. I trudge to the hospital, get the stares again but I couldn’t be arsed. Let them wait, it’s all going to shit anyway. This whole situation reminds me of the concentration camps. Once you get the gas, it’s tickets for you. My entire ward has new faces – not a single person survived the night. I’m choked up but I can’t let it show. “How are you doing there, young man? Yeah, I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. But you’re in the best hands here.” There are no lies in there, but there’s very little truth. I’m not scared – I’m terrified. And these might be the best hands, but even they are no help at all. No one can stop the inevitable. No one but God, and even he’s having a right time of it. I continue my rounds, meeting new faces for the first and last time. At the very end of the ward lies a couple. They’ve requested to be together for as long as possible. Their beds are pressed firmly against each other, and each bedsheet produces a thin arm ending in a hand clasping another. They haven’t let go since the moment they arrived; I’d been told. The bony hands remind me of John, so very near the end. We also didn’t let go. Well, I didn’t. Their faces are turned to each other, and every so often, when energy allows, they gift each other a small smile. “Hang in there,” it says, “We’ve got this.” I watched them ebb and flow over the next four days. Life, like the ocean, would tease with a wave before pulling it right back again. On the fifth day, however, only she would flow. He would ebb and ebb and ebb until there was nothing left that could bring him to shore. The tide had turned. I will never forget the sheer animalistic scream I heard that day. I knew it because I too had screamed that scream. I too had had my soul ripped from my body. I watched as they began to wheel him out of my ward, and I watched as she refused to let go of his hand. I watched as the other nursing staff tried to pry her hand from his, and I watched as she fell from her bed and tried, amidst gut-wrenching sobs and crippling disease, to crawl after him, as if she could somehow breathe life back into him through sheer force of will. I watched her, and I watched myself, and I felt the deep pit of despair hollow out again. George and I are back in front of the telly. We’ve skipped all the pleasantries today. I emptied two tins of tuna in his bowl when I got home and sank into the couch while he ate. He joined me after. “Tuna breath”, I said as he made himself comfortable on his side, but he didn’t give a damn about my olfactory discomfort. Instead of Netflix, we’ve opted for a chat. His face tells me it’s not his first choice. “Just hear me out, fatty,” I say, “it’s been a bitch of a day.” He gives me the scowl – he hates it when I use dog references. “Fine, it’s been a right cunt, ok? I don’t think I can do this anymore.” He tells me in no uncertain terms that I will still do it, regardless of whether or not I think I can. When John died, I’d taken two months off work, and I think that having me home all the time might actually have been the bigger trauma for him. “But it hurts so much,” I’m in tears now. “I think about him all the time!” George looks at me with his big blue eyes. ‘I know’, they say, ‘me too’. Remarkably, the sun is shining the next day. A rare occurrence in the dreary UK. I’ve overslept and I’m running late, but my head is finally clear – I know this is what I’m destined to do. I took the oath to save, and save I will. As I approach my ward, I’m hopeful that today will be better. I will make an impact and at least one person will rest easier thanks to me. I remember my mantra – save one. I see a few new faces as I walk in, but the gaunter other ones I have seen before. All eyes are on me now – I’m the saviour for this shift. Well, all eyes but two. There’s no saviour for her. Her back is turned, and she doesn’t acknowledge my presence. I start my rounds at the bed nearest the entrance: pupils, vitals, next of kin. NEXT! Pupils, vitals… and so it goes. I finally reach her bed. “Hey, how are you holding up here,” I ask gently. She doesn’t budge. “I’m here to help, I promise.” I hear a muffled sob, ‘no one can help me’, it says. I close the curtains around her bed – the hospital encourages privacy for the meek. “It’s ok,” I comfort her, “I know exactly how you feel – I know you’re angry, and I know you’re sad, and I know that you’ll never move on.” She’s looking at me now – she knows that I know. I check her pupils and her vitals, but there’s no next of kin. “Shhhh,” reassure her, “everything’s going to be ok.” I stroke the hair from her face and think of me and George and how he’s my next of cat. I stifle something between a chuckle and a sob. My next of cat, man, what a concept. “Let’s make you a little more comfortable, I say as I fluff and rearrange her pillows. I’ve become well-versed in this pillow trick. I move the first to the left and the second to the right, to form a neat little V at the top of her head so that it doesn’t roll around. I take the third pillow and puff it up by squishing it from both sides. This is the magic pillow. I can tell that she can’t wait. I lower it slowly to cover her face. She doesn’t even fight me. She twitches once, twice, and then she lets go. She’s reached for his hand on the other side. She’s got nothing to hold onto here. I tidy up and slip out between the curtains knowing that no one will suspect a thing. They never have. Everyone here dies of asphyxiation – only it’s his death that ultimately closed up her throat. I get to my apartment just as George is starting his run-up to the flap. He stops short and decides that I may usher him in. “I did it, buddy, I saved one today.” He purrs and rubs up against my legs. I know that he knows. He knows that I saved her from a life of loneliness; saved her from the fear. That I saved her from countless takeaways and rotten flowers. That I saved her from being me.