I wrote this in 2002 and just thought about it today and had to go searching for it on the PC. Crudely edited and formatted as this was from eighteen years ago...

                                                                                                         OUTBREAK

  

To Meg O’Malley, Doctor Brian Hunter seemed more like a college student then a full-fledged MD with a degree in communicable diseases and another in hematology.  He had the sort of boyish good looks that would keep people mistaking him for a much younger man all his life.  His naturally wavy, sandy-blond hair was flyaway and shoulder length, combed haphazardly back away from his face and more or less contained in a stubby ponytail.  There were always stray, wispy strands of hair standing out around his head forming a delicate aura that shone white in the sunlight.  He seldom bothered to shave, but would never allow a full beard or moustache to grow in.  He wore small pewter-framed glasses for close work. His eyes were a startlingly clear blue, very piercing when he was at his most intense.  In this equatorial climate his standard uniform was a black t-shirt, khaki cargo shorts, an old pair of Nikes and his white lab coat.  Every time she saw him in the camp’s clinic or lab she was jolted by his youthful appearance and his boundless energy.  Sometimes he seemed to fairly vibrate, even when he was sitting still, hunched over his microscope.  Often he could be seen rushing around the compound, the tails of his lab coat flying in the still, torpid air.  He spoke as rapidly as he moved.  It was disconcerting to work with someone like Brian Hunter, but he was brilliant and dedicated, so they all more or less had gotten used to his presence.  “Here are the blood sample slides you wanted,” she said, setting the rack of slides down on the counter to his left.  He was left-handed.

 “Thanks, Meg.  That was quick,” he replied, pausing to push his glasses up in order to rub his eyes.  He had been peering into the microscope since dawn.  Now his stomach growled loudly as he glanced at his field watch.  “One o’clock already!”  He looked stunned, then flashed a lopsided grin at the pretty Irish lab technician.  “Suppose you’ve eaten already.”

 “Over an hour ago.”  She pulled a cheese sandwich from one coat pocket, a can of Coke from the other.  “I thought you might be too busy to eat.”

 “That’s what I admire about you.  You’re a thinker.”  He took the sandwich and soda  setting them on the counter.  “What’s the latest?” he asked.

  “Three more have died.  Seventeen more have been brought in.  Four of those appear to be in an advanced stage as they exhibit signs of liver and renal failure.  Pat is preparin’ some slides of blood samples drawn from the new patients right now.  I’ll bring them to you as soon as they’re ready.”

  “Has the little girl died?”

  “No.  She’s still hangin’ in there.”

  “When you get a chance draw another sample.  Three tubes should be enough.   I’m going to be running some additional tests later today. Her case is progressing differently from all the others. It’s the same virus, but her body appears to have the ability to sustain a prolonged counterattack on whatever it is that has invaded the blood of these people. I’m trying to find and isolate an antigen in her blood.  If I can do that then perhaps we can develop an antibody or a vaccine and offer these poor people some hope and relief from this thing.”

  “I’ll draw the blood myself, but I’m not sure I can get three tubes out of her.”

  “Do the best you can.  And no slacking in barrier technique,” he warned.  His blue eyes met hers briefly.

  During those few seconds he looked straight at her Meg was rocked by the sudden realization that Brian Hunter had feelings for her beyond those of a co-worker.  How had she missed all the previous signals he must have sent in the past few weeks- or was this something new, something only he’d just become aware of himself?  Her heart skittering in her breast, her mind trying to reconcile itself to this unexpected but not unwelcome revelation , she went out into the corridor and immediately collided with a technician, masked, gloved, and goggled, who was carrying a rack of test tubes containing freshly drawn blood from the isolation ward.  The two technicians staggered and stumbled trying to regain their balance.  The test tube rack tilted and the tubes fell to the floor and shattered, sending up a spray of fine shards of glass and blood.  The masked technician had thrown his arm up to further protect his face, but Meg, completely caught off guard, was struck in the face by sharp glass and drops of blood.

   She was leaning against the wall, her right hand over her right eye, stunned, when Doctor Hunter came rushing out of the lab.  He looked from the mess on the floor, to the masked and safety-goggled technician, then to Meg who only wore latex gloves.  His face was very pale, his blue eyes wide with shock.  “No, Meg!” he cried as the tip of her tongue darted out to lick the droplet of blood poised dead center on her lower lip.  “Spit it out!” 

 With horror she did exactly that, and then felt her stomach roil.  She struggled not to vomit as Doctor Hunter came closer, his eyes on her face.  “God Almighty,” he murmured, a note of near panic in his voice.  He grabbed her by the left wrist and pulled her away from the wall.  “Come on!  Hurry!”

  In the lab he leaned her over the sink and splashed water on her face.   Leaning hard on her shoulders he forced her under the faucet, turning her head to let the water wash directly over her face.  “You’re drownin’ me!” she cried.

  “Hold your breath!” he snapped.  Meg thought for sure he was going to kill her. 

“Don’t just stand there!  Go get Doctor Rosen!” he shouted wildly at the other technician who must have followed them into the lab.  She could not see. Her injured eye was still clamped shut protectively and her left eye was full of water and tears.  “Come on.  Open your eye for me,” he said in a more soothing tone.  “Meg, open your eye and let me see what’s in there.”

  “It hurts!”
              “I know.  I know,” he said quietly.  Gently his fingers probed around her still closed eye.  “Is it glass then?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Damn,” he swore softly.  “All right.  Easy now.  I’m going to blot your face dry.”

  Meg stayed bent over the sink while he blotted her face with paper towels.  She felt the draft caused by the lab door swinging open quickly.  “What’s happened?” Doctor Rosen’s voice demanded brusquely.

  “She collided with the other lab tech in the hall and was splashed with blood.  We think there’s a bit of glass in her eye from one of the broken test tubes.”

  “She’s been contaminated?”  The doctor’s voice held a note of shock and horror.

Meg began to shake.

   “Yes,” Brian Hunter replied, a curious quaver in his response.

   “Then she’s as good as gon…”

   “Doctor, will you kindly examine her eye and treat her injury.”  Doctor Hunter’s voice was suddenly clipped and authoritative.  He put his gloved hand on Meg’s blood splattered sleeve. “Do you want me to go with you?”  She nodded.

   Meg lay on a cot in the isolation tent.  Insects buzzed incessantly around her head, but she was too weak to swat at them.  Her body was wracked by a persistent burning fever. Her head ached.  Her throat was sore.  She was extremely thirsty, but an hour ago she had been unable to hold even an ounce of water down.  The IV irritated her left hand and they had tied her right wrist to the cot rail to keep her from pulling it out.  If the disease didn’t kill her first she was going to die of starvation and dehydration.  Already her fingers were so thin that she had lost her school ring.  Brian had found it, getting down on his hands and knees to search every inch of the floor until with a cry of triumph he’d held up the ring. She had seen a glint of gold, but hadn’t been able to see the ring clearly.  Her injured eye was bandaged. The vision in her good eye was disintegrating.

   As she lay in the hot tent her thoughts ping-ponged tiredly from her family to her cozy little Galway flat, to Brian Hunter hunched over his microscope searching desperately for answers that would come too late for her.  She wanted to cry.  He was trying so hard to find a cure.  Every time he came to see her his face behind the mask looked more gaunt and haggard, his boyish appearance rapidly being replaced by the bleary-eyed visage of a fanatic.  At least his voice was the same.  He still sounded warm and caring.

Doctor Hunter stood beside the small girl’s cot.  It was all he could do not to grab her and shake her, to scream at her to give up her secrets.  He’d seen so many people die already.  Meg was dying.  He could deal with the deaths of strangers, of patients, but not Meg’s imminent passing. She’d come to this distant, hot, nearly primitive country to help these people,  not to die from whatever it was that was decimating the villages in this immediate area.  Why was this child still alive?  Why hadn’t he been able to successfully isolate the antigen in her blood?  Why were all his tests failures?  Dead ends?  Time was running out.  It was rapidly, irrevocably running out.  For all of these people…for Meg.

           He clenched his fists as he turned and strode quickly away.

Meg sensed someone nearby.  She could not open her good eye, but she turned her head very slightly with great effort toward the left.  “It’s me, Meg.”

 “…thirs…ty,” she whispered.  He dabbed her parched lips with a wet cloth.   A few drops of water trickled into her mouth causing her to retch violently.

“Shh!  Shh!” he soothed, stroking her hot, dry cheek.

“I’m…dying.”

“I’m sorry, Meg,” he said, his voice hollow with despair and defeat.

“Bri…an….I”

 “Don’t speak.”

 “I…love…” She heard him bite back a sob.  “Send…ring…home…to Mum.”

 “I will,” he whispered.

 “Tell her…tell…her…I…”  Meg could not speak any longer.  Her strength was gone.

 “I’ll tell her you love her. I’ll take care of everything.  I’ll see that you get home.”  He bent and pressed his masked lips against her cheek.  “I love you,” he whispered at her ear.  A flicker of a smile at the corners of her mouth just preceded a terrible seizure mercifully cut short by the sudden arrival of death.  Meg’s ravaged body sank wearily into Death’s embrace.

  Brian looked at her for a few moments longer then he walked outside into the sultry twilight.

Less than a week after Meg’s death Doctor Hunter was hurrying across the compound when he happened to notice a small boy of about nine years of age carrying a bundle of sticks and boards toward the pit where the bodies of the local victims of the wretched disease were being burned. What caught his eye were pieces of weathered board with something painted on them in black and yellow.  “Hey!  Wait up!” he called.

           The boy, startled by his shout, dropped the bundle and fled.  Brian crouched down, grabbing the narrow, flat slats, pulling them free of the bundle of sticks.  Flipping them all painted side up he put them together like a macabre puzzle, his heart thudding, his stomach roiling.  “My God!” he cried.  “Oh, my God!”  He stood up, looking wildly about him.  The boy was long gone, but Brian knew he must have found the weathered boards somewhere nearby.

 He turned his eyes toward the boards again and the words were like a knife plunged straight into his heart- “U.S. GOVERNMENT BIOLOGICAL WARFARE WEAPONS TESTING AREA-DANGER-DO NOT ENTER!”

COVID Hit Close to Heart and a Warning

Although I am an author and an artist my full time job is as a secretary in a medical office with multiple providers and a fairly large staff. COVID ran through our office which caused a rapidly changing series of events that saw me first moved into a more quarantined area, then sent home to work from home for nearly two weeks before finally being allowed back into the office last week as one of only four office staff/front desk girls allowed in the entire first floor of the building at this time.

One woman, a few years younger than me, had the most serious case of all our office members, providers, and staff. She was hospitalized nearly a month ago and had to be sustained on life support. Updates on her condition were few and far between because of the chaotic manner in which we were working to keep the office running and the patients' needs met with only a handful of employees able to work from home and providers doing televisits from their homes or, if allowed back into the office after being cleared, their offices in the building with limited access to other areas. All any of us could do was pray for her recovery and keep our fingers crossed that she would have the strength and determination to pull through. It was deeply disheartening and saddening to read the daily obituaries and recognize many patient names on those pages. We truly do care about our patients and have known many of them for decades. It was both stunning and sobering to comprehend just how pervasive and widespread this virus is, how invasive and insidious it is, and how rapidly it spreads...and how devastating the outcome can be, especially for the elderly and those with preexisting health conditions as noted by health experts.

Yesterday, the four of us currently working in the office watched the video of our co-worker on our cell phones as she was released from the hospital, in a wheelchair, on oxygen still and behind a mask. But she waved. The hospital wanted to send her to rehab after being in a hospital bed for nearly a month but she defied them, got out of that bed and walked from it to the bathroom with the help of a walker because she wanted to go home that bad and COVID was not going to stop her. In the brief image of her as she approached the family member recording her departure from the hospital one can see the fatigue and the toll this virus has taken on her, and we could understand the long road still ahead of her as she recovers her strength and former vitality.  All four of us cried. All four of us wanted to hug and reassure one another that one day in the future we'll have normalcy back in our lives, but even though the four of us are healthy, feel well, and display no symptoms, we go back out into the world, to our homes and families, out in the community to buy essentials, use the ATM, pick up food at the drive thru, etc...and could be picking up the virus and carrying it around. So while we are allowed to work together, we have to stay as far apart from one another as we can get, wear masks, and gloves, if touching common surfaces the others touch, such as the fax machine, doorknobs, etc.

We're thrilled and relieved that our coworker has survived and has been allowed to go home to start her rehab after such a life-threatening experience with COVID, but we also know it's going to be a long time yet before all of us can work together again and the office will be back to a more normal flow.

Through this whole COVID crisis I've seen two coworkers land in the hospital, the previous one only hospitalized for about a week, and others who were sick for one to two weeks with milder symptoms, and am aware of several still testing positive and some testing negative. Your fellow employees are like your extended family. After so many years of working together you know a lot about one another, and you care about everyone to varying degrees. You don't wish ill upon any of them- yet you are suddenly seeing your workplace deeply rocked by a pandemic that there are people out there denouncing as a hoax, not as serious as the experts are making it out to be, and saying things need to get back to normal quickly. A workplace is a microcosm of the real world. We were hit hard. We very nearly lost someone, could have lost another, and had multiple others sick with varying degrees of illness, some of whom are still recovering at home. The number of us in the office is close to the number in a standard classroom. If we all walked back into that classroom right now, there would be some of us exposed to this virus who would get sick, take it home and perhaps make our family members sick. If we have elderly family members, or family members with health conditions in the home or that we are going to visit and take supplies and food to then we could potentially sicken them, or even be responsible for killing them if we knowingly go to a place where the virus has run rampant. Even with taking precautions you cannot see the virus, so you cannot be sure whether or not you're carrying it home on your skin, your clothing, your jacket, or lunch bag. It should be a cause of concern and not dismissed as "it can't happen to me, I wash my hands and wear a mask...etc." A virus is microscopic. It lives for hours on surfaces. You can potentially bring it home from wherever you go.

I nearly lost not only a fellow co-worker, but someone I care about and consider a friend after 13 years of working together. We've celebrated many occasions in her family, watched her children grow, I've been to her home, celebrated when her granddaughter was born. As I mentioned before, you spend a lot of time on a daily basis with your co-workers, more time with them on an average weekday then you spend with your own family. This could have ended tragically. I'm happier than I can actually express that it had a good outcome for her and her family.

Please be careful and think about what you are at risk for losing if you are too hasty in your pursuit to return to a more normal life. You could be placing a beloved family member, a friend, that friend's family, an acquaintance, that acquaintance's family, and your co-workers at risk. Just stay safe, stay smart, and don't be swayed by ignorance and impatience. Listen to your own common sense, make your choices carefully and considerately. If able, help those who need assistance during this time. If you need help, reach out and ask and don't be embarrassed about it. There are good people in the world; there is help out there.

And thank you to those who are selflessly helping. You are doing something positive to get as many of us as possible through this COVID pandemic. I'll admit right here, I am not particularly religious. I do believe in a higher being we call God. I do believe He does hear your prayers even if you sit quarantined in your home, socially distancing in the office, or while in your car at a red light. He hears what's in your heart. So, simply pray in place, not just for yourself and your family, but for all of us.

He answered our prayers for our co-worker and gave us all a sign of hope which we needed after being hit so hard. If you haven't experienced a close to the heart hit from this virus, then bless you and yours, you're lucky. Our office is just a tiny representation of the entire medical field out there battling COVID on a 24-7 basis. I truly admire those on the frontlines in hospitals and cannot begin to fathom the strength, bravery, and determination powering those health care workers through this crisis. It's too grand a scale to imagine. I'm just thankful that they're there fighting to save lives and sitting with the ones losing their battles who would otherwise be alone.

I wish more people would think before they speak. If you're healthy and your family is healthy it's because so many others are working and struggling to follow the rules and guidelines to keep as many of us as possible safe and healthy. If you're in a big hurry to get back to the way things used to be then be aware that more lives will be lost. Take a long look around you and you may see the face of the next virus victim sitting at your table, lounging on the couch, shooting baskets out in the driveway, asleep in their crib, or coming in from a walk to get some fresh air. Those are the lives you're impatience and lack of understanding is placing at risk, not to mention just your own.

An Older Story Woman Stung By Jellyfish Succumbs

This was written sometime between 2006 and 2012...

                                                                                                                                               

WOMAN STUNG BY JELLYFISH SUCCUMBS

      “Listen to this! ‘Woman Stung By Jellyfish Succumbs!’  Now isn’t that the craziest headline you’ve ever heard?  Why would they even print such rubbish!”
     “Maybe the woman was someone, you know, important or something," I reply as I continue to stack silver dollar pancakes one on top of the other using butter and syrup as mortar. “Maybe she had a rare allergy to jellyfish bites.”
     “And maybe, just maybe, nobody gives a…”
     “Peter!” Mother says, stopping my father’s runaway verbal train dead against the brick wall of her authoritative tone.  I glance up and catch “the eye” she beams my way.  It glances off my optic nerve like a boomerang as I shift my eyes toward my little brother in his booster seat across from me.  He looks startled by the residual hostility that slams into his awareness, drops his spoonful of soggy cereal with a clatter onto the formica tabletop.  His lower lip curls outward and downward in the very beginnings of a good bawl.  “Joey, pick up that spoon and eat your breakfast!” Mother snaps at him.  He jumps as though he’s been goosed by a bare electrical wire.  I feel pity for him for now he looks both stunned and confused.
     “Stow the tractor in the barn,” I tell him, stabbing a pancake with my fork and stuffing it into my mouth to demonstrate.  I chew with exaggerated viciousness, my eyes locked to his.  “Yum,” I say.
     “Don’t talk with your mouth full!” Mother scolds.
     “All I want to know is how the hell a person can die from a single jellyfish sting!” my father grumbles, rattling his newspaper irritably.
     I resume construction on my pancake tower, thinking I might actually be able to top the twenty-one pancakes I stacked when I was ten.  That was around three years ago.  Joey hadn’t even been born yet.  “Eat your breakfast!  Don’t play with your food!  You’re thirteen years old!  No wonder he doesn’t eat!  What kind of example are you setting for your brother?”
     I want to counter by shooting the last question right back at her, but before I can even open my mouth she slashes her butter knife through my sixteen-pancake tower, toppling it into the liquid remains of my scrambled eggs.  I raise my eyes, glaring at her.  Her eyes are hard as diamonds, cold and bitter.  If she was a season she would be winter.  I hate the smug self-satisfaction she wears like lipstick on her mouth.  Under the table I clench my hands into fists, deliberately digging the ragged nubs of my fingernails into my multi-perforated flesh, giving myself the bittersweet pleasure that pain can provide to the emotionally starved.
     “It’s not like you can’t see the damn things in the water,” my father continues, still hidden behind the protective shield of his paper.
     “Let it go,” my mother says darkly, then, “Jamie, you’re finished!  Leave the table!”
     I am released!  Her wrath is not focused on me this morning after all.  As I carry my plate to the sink I hear the flat smack of flesh on flesh followed by several seconds of tense silence, then the high-pitched shriek of my little brother. “What’d you go and hit him for?” my father asks, sounding merely curious rather than indignant.
     “Jellyfish,” I mutter, my voice concealed by the screech of my knife scraping my plate into the sink under the tap.  "Spineless jellyfish,” I hiss as the garbage disposal growls and grinds up my pancakes.
     “Turn that thing off!”  Mother’s voice, strident as an air raid siren, pierces the noise that fills the kitchen- Joey bawling, my father rustling his newspaper, the garbage disposal grinding and slurping.  I give the switch a pert flip then quickly leave the kitchen, going outside into the chilly November morning.
     A little while later I’m sitting on the back steps retying my shoelace when the back door slams open and Joey is shoved outdoors.  He’s saved from certain physical damage by sheer dumb luck.  His trajectory of expulsion lands him against my back so that he simply falls hard on his knees on the step behind me, his arms thrown wide, his face against my spine.  “Get up!” I say, then shudder, the echo of my mother’s voice in mine.  “Come on, you’re all right.  Quit crying.”
     But Joey’s not all right.  His little nose still leaks blood thinned with mucous.  His cheek is aflame with the imprint of Mother’s hand.  There’s blood on his lip and chin too.  I stand him on the ground in front of me, roll his lip down to assess the extent of damage.  A little tear.  Not like the time she smacked him so hard his tooth came right through the skin just beneath his lower lip.  “It hurz,” he says, sounding funny because I still have a hold of his lip. 
     “Yeah, I know, but it ain’t so bad.  It’ll heal.”  I release his lip, fumble in my coat pocket for some tissues and blot the blood and snot, tears and drool from his face.  “Shake it off, kiddo,” I advise as I look into his big brown eyes, but I can’t look for long or it gives me a real heartache.  None of that Elvis Presley heartbreak crap either.  This is the real deal.  I steer my eyes away, gaze across the littered backyard toward the barn.  The front of a rust dulled John Deere tractor pokes from the door like the nose of an old iron horse.  I have an urge to go pat that cold metal nose, but it passes quickly like most of my urges do.  I have lowered myself into the deep end of the pool of apathy.  There’s no lifeguard on duty.
     “Jellyfish,” Joey says, drooling blood and saliva.
     “Yeah, they’ve got stingers like bees,” I tell him.
     “Why?”
     Joey’s never been to the ocean, but he’s seen it on TV.  “I don’t know.  Self defense, I guess.”  He seems about to grill me by means of an endless series of ‘whys?’, so I maneuver to cut the inquisition short.  “Come on, kiddo.  Time to make ourselves scarce.”  I hate weekends.  I dread weekends.  I wish I lived far away at a very strict private school run by ogres who’d never allow me to go home on weekends and holidays.
     “Jamie!  Wait up!” Joey cries.  He’s got something wrong with his left leg, a birth deformity.  It’s a little shorter than his right leg.  He totters when he runs, his own momentum making him sway dangerously side to side like a bowling pin kissed hard by the ball.  “You go too fast!” he complains.
     I stop and wait for him to catch up.  When he reaches me I bend, grab him under the arms and swing him up onto my hip and carry him the rest of the way to the barn.  We have a secret fort in the hay loft.  Only the mice and barn cats know about it.  It’s where we disappear to every weekend after breakfast.  We don’t go back inside until we hear the dinner bell ring.  That’s the unspoken rule.

“I’m hungry,” Joey whines.  He’s lying in the hay beside me.  I’ve been listening to his stomach growl for the past two hours.  His fat lip warps his speech, gives him a lisp.  I checked earlier to make sure none of his teeth had been prematurely loosened and had noticed one was already gone.  I’d spent all afternoon not turning my thoughts toward how that tooth had come to be missing, but it was an unfair fight.  You just can’t pit raw rage against apathy in a fair fight.  The former’s always a heavyweight, always the winner.
     “God damn it!” I shout, rising up from the hay in the near darkness like a wraith.  “Come on!  I’ll wring her neck if she ain’t got dinner on the table!  I swear to God I will!”
     “Jamie!” Joey yelps, frightened.
     “Come on!  Get up!  I’m cold and I’m hungry and I’m tired of laying here in mouse-piss straw listening to your stomach growl like a dog!”  I bend, grasp his skinny wrists and haul him to his feet.  “When I’m older,” I say, bending down so my face is close to his, “When I’m full grown up we’re getting the hell out of here.”  He nods, staring into my eyes, well aware of my often spoken promise to take him away from the farm as soon as I’m able to.  I hate being thirteen.  I hate being old enough to know something is very wrong in our lives but too young to do anything about it.  “Let’s go eat, kiddo.”
     The house is dark.  There’s no smell of cooking coming from any of the gaps around the windows and door.  The pickup truck sits in the yard same as it was this morning.  I don’t recall hearing my father leave to go get a haircut or to buy some feed or anything.  That in and of itself is unusual, cause to suspect something isn’t quite right.  “Wait here,” I tell Joey, setting him on the ground near the chopping block and pile of kindling.  “Just stay put right there.”  His eyes are like teacups, his swollen lip quivering as I mount the back steps and pull open the screen door.  The hinges squeal like stuck pigs and a shiver runs down my spine.
     I open the back door, my lungs feeling fiery with lack of oxygen in my tight chest.  I can hear the ticking of the wall clock.  For a moment that’s all I hear, but then comes the all-too-familiar rattle and rustle of my father’s newspaper.  But it’s dark in the kitchen and he never reads the paper at dinner time.  I peer toward his shadowy form seated at the table.  “Pa?” I say, my voice as parched and dry as the fields this past summer.  “Pa?  Can I turn on the light?”
     “Sure you can,” he says, his voice almost jovial.  This sends another cold shiver shooting down my spine.
     “We’re hungry,” I explain, cold fingers fumbling for the light switch.  I find it, flip it up and blink as  yellow light blooms in the room.  The first thing I notice are the rest of the breakfast dishes sitting on the table, Joey’s cereal bowl still spewing its meager contents toward the lazy Susan in the middle of the table.  No one has replaced the cap on the syrup bottle or put the cover on the butter dish.  The second thing I notice is the odd odor in the room.  It raises goosebumps all over me for it is an odd but familiar odor.  Blood.  I know the smell of blood from when my father butchers the pigs, and when my mother wrings a chicken’s neck then chops its floppy head off.
     My eyes shift from where my father sits at the table hidden behind his newspaper to the empty seat normally occupied by my mother.  I force myself to keep my eyes moving.  My heart now throbs with trepidation as I slowly take in my mother’s worn shoes, her thin legs, the faded hem of her skirt, the riveted wood handle of the knife that protrudes from her chest, the pool of dark, coagulated blood that she lies in.  Behind me Joey whimpers from cold, hunger, and anxiety at being left out in the dark.  “Jamie, can I come in now?”
     “No, not yet,” I reply tensely.  “Pa,” I say, trying to keep the terror out of my voice.  I don’t want for him to lower his newspaper.  I don’t want to see him- his face, his eyes, the set of his mouth.  “Pa?”
     “Woman stung by jellyfish succumbs,” he says as though reading the same headline he’d read to us this morning, but I know he’s no longer reading aloud.  Another deep shudder rattles down my backbone, sets my teeth to chattering.  Behind his newspaper my father begins to chuckle.  The chuckle quickly swells grotesquely into a laugh that sends me backing out through the kitchen door as silently as I can go.  I pull the door shut, but still I can hear him laughing.  I release my sweaty grip on the doorknob, turn and leap down the steps, grab Joey up into my arms in passing.  “Shh!” I whisper in his cold ear.
     It’s a good three and a half miles to the Barnes’ farm across land flat as a pancake.  I’m dizzy with hunger and adrenalin as I hurry away from the house.  Joey clings to me, crying softly but not knowing exactly why he’s crying.  I have no tears.  That well is long dry.  “Stop your crying, do you hear?” I say. 
     I wonder how many footsteps away we are from freedom.  My ears strain for the sound of the old pickup’s familiar rattle and roar, but my breathing fills my ears.  Joey’s shuddery gasps punctuate my weary huffs.  Freedom seems unattainable, as far away as the white stars that twinkle above us in the ever darkening sky.  But I won’t stop walking toward it.  I can’t stop walking toward it for I have made a promise to my brother and I swear to God I will keep it.  No matter what, I will keep it.
     

Camp Nano Not Going Well

I agreed to do Camp NaNo with Kelly this month. I got off to a good start, but then ran into buts of not wanting to do anything but draw cute animals and birds. That seemed to be making me happier than writing. I would write fifteen pages in a burst of productivity and then crash the next day, just wanting to watch westerns on TV and do word search puzzles and not have to think.

I have more than my usual level of anxiety, and quite possibly some mild degree of depression going on. Normally I'm a happy-go-lucky, upbeat person, but since this COVID-19 pandemic erupted I've been feeling frustrated, angry, annoyed, disgusted, and saddened by things going on.

Anyway...I have three books nearly ready to self publish, but little motivation to get things done at resent. I have found some older stories that tweaked my desire to write, but that fizzled out due to stress, I would hazard to guess.

I am over 25,000 words into my Camp Nano novella, but stuck as to the direction this needs to go. Meanwhile, I'm thoroughly enjoying Kelly's Camp Nano project, the prequel to Hawkists. Also I'm reading what all my WhipCity Wordsmiths are posting on our facebook page while we're all practicing social distancing. I'm enjoying the myriad talents and the many genres we all write in. Also, I am enjoying the audio readings by some of my authors. Bravo! They perk up my days!

This evening I was surprised to find someone has ordered a number of my books from Amazon. They are three of my favorites. Two were specifically written for Kelly, and the third is my vampire novel, which is non-traditional, to say the least!

Guess that's it for tonight- off to watch Ghost Hunters! Have a good night!

Eerie & Strange at the Office

A skeleton crew has been allowed back into the medical office where I work. After working from home for a week and a half I moved back into the office this past Monday night during a rain storm (it had let up by 7PM after a day full of torrential bursts of rain and strong gusts of wind that I kept an eye on from the den window as I worked throughout the day.

First of all, I need to say that it is heartbreaking to scan the obituaries each day and find patient names and pictures. Of course not all of them are COVID-19 victims. Some are passing from natural causes or pre-existing terminal health conditions. It's just that the list seems to grow by one or two daily.

I started back at the office yesterday (Tuesday, the 14th). I am alone in suite 2, although there was an NP in making televisit calls from her office I hardly saw her. In suite 1 a doctor was making his televisits from his office at the opposite end of the building from where I work. The woman who scans the EMR into the system was busy going through a veritable mountain of faxes that had come in last week, plus all; the work I did from home which I delivered in a copy paper box Monday night to her work area. There is one receptionist fielding phone cals and call patients to remind them of the televisits the next day. And there is one woman handling referrals, test orders, answering the phone as the back-up receptionist, fielding questions, VNA calls, group home calls, etc. After 13 years of walking through the double suite doing my job it was very strange and somewhat eerie today to walk through darkened areas (no point in leaving lights on when we have no patients and very few employees working at the moment). There is no music, just silence, so when the phone rings it makes you jump.

I'm more or less quarantined to suite 2 but I do have to mask and glove up to go to suite 1 to fax stacks of stuff that need signatures, to be filled out and returned, this includes piles of VNA orders, durable medical equipment prescriptions, mail order medicine orders for nebulizers, and so forth. One other employee and I share the kitchenette, but I just sit at my desk and eat my lunch while she sits behind a wall in the kitchenette eating hers. We both quietly play games or check messages on our phones for an hour while eating and then she returns to suite 1 and I resume my work. Normally the office is full of patients coming and going, providers bustling about, and employees chatting and coming and going. It's like an apocalyptic world where there are just a handful of survivors trying to maintain some semblance of a normal routine.

The office has been so heavily disinfected that there is a lingering irritating miasma of chemical odors hanging in the air. There are no windows to open and we can't just leave doors open or people will walk in and we can't have anyone in the office at this time. It's like sick building syndrome, but the disinfecting had been necessary. I worked all day yesterday and came home with that cloying odor on my clothes, in my hair, in my nose, and most troublesome, in my lungs. This morning I woke up coughing and with shortness of breath and had to use my inhaler for the first time since being sick at the end of January into February. My lung feel irritated by the lingering fumes.

I am happy to be back in my familiar workspace with everything I need close at hand, nt working out of two rooms at my house trying to keep track of paperwork. I'm way more organized at work and can spread out all in one place.

Upstairs the lab is closed and the physical therapy place sees few patients and they are well-spaced. The VNA has some nurses checking in and picking up equipment in the morning, and then the parking lot, normally very busy, is empty except for employee vehicles you can count on one hand.

As a writer, I am constantly observing, listening, and filing stuff away in my brain for use in future stories...believe me, there is a lot of material accumulating for post-apocalyptic stories, and even ghost stories. Social distancing and quarantining has given my imagination plenty of room to expand, plenty f fertile soil for all these ideas to grow in.

So Many Chances

SO MANY CHANCES by Susan Buffum (Copyright Susan Buffum 2018)

When no one was looking I spit into my brother’s casket because I was mad at him. My scratching his wrist with my ragged fingernail earlier had drawn no blood, just sort of scuffed up his flesh a bit. I really wanted to punch him with my balled up fist, just lay into him like I’d seen Henry do a hundred times and raise a big bruise along the sharp ridge of his jaw but my Aunt Nancy had come up on my blindside, startling me so badly I’d nearly toppled off the prie dieu I’d been standing on to reach him. She’d told me it was for kneeling on, not standing on with dirty shoes. My shoes weren’t dirty, but she’d lifted me off anyway, setting me on the carpet, shooing me away to stand with my brothers and sisters, telling me to behave myself because funerals were solemn occasions.

My mama was sitting in a wingchair dabbing her swollen eyes with a plain white handkerchief someone had given her when she’d run out of tissues. Her face was all distorted as if she was made of pallid dough that someone had kneaded with careless hands, giving her a new face with red eyes and a jack-o-lantern mouth. She hadn’t put her partial in as she was just so distraught. Her hair, blonde shot through with white, was pulled severely back into a taut bun at the nape of her neck. I didn’t know  her like this so was avoiding her every time she reached toward me trying to draw me close. She smelled of gardenias. It was giving me a headache.

My papa was standing beside her chair. He looked like a mannequin from the department store, a grim look molded on his face, his eyes like painted plaster of Paris they were so flat and lifeless. There was a little scab on his chin where he’d nicked himself shaving with the straight razor this morning. He had one hand on the back of the chair. His hands were huge for a man his size, his fingers like fat sausages. There was still some dirt underneath his nails. He could never get it all out. His suit hung on him as if sewn for a bigger man two sizes larger. The collar of his shirt gaped away from the cords of his thin neck even though he’d drawn the knot of his tie as tight as he could. The toe of his left shoe was scuffed. He’d stumbled climbing the three stairs into the funeral home. My brother Johnny had caught him by the elbow, helped him regain his balance. Neither one of them had said anything about me walking backwards up the cement ramp meant for the handicapped. I hadn’t wanted to come inside so I was pretending to be leaving.

Johnny was standing on the other side of our mother and he looked like a TV commercial for shampoo or something with his pale-blonde hair shining and blow-dried, not a single hair out of place. He was a handsome devil according to everyone in town but none of his three exe wives were here. There was a girl around my sister Anita’s age standing beside him. I gave her a look and she gave me one right back, gripping his hand more firmly as if I might have cast the evil eye upon her and she was a little scared of what curse I’d summoned from the depths of my dark little soul. “Get in line, already, will you,” Johnny hissed at me. “And wipe that look off your face. Nobody wants to see that monkey puss at a funeral.”

“I was born looking like this,” I replied.

“More’s the pity,” he retorted.

 “Why’s she got that eye patch on?” the girl’s voice murmured to Johnny, but I had two perfectly good ears and heard her just the same.

“Poked her damn eye out with a stick when she was two years old,” he replied.

I stomped on Anita’s right foot in passing her and she retaliated by cuffing me upside the head. I hated her and she hated me. I hated that she was fifteen and pretty. She hated that I was seven and didn’t listen to anyone anymore. She hadn’t set herself free from the switch and the backhand when she was my age, having had no vision of a brighter future, I guess. I stopped in front of my brother Joe, looking up at him. He ignored me for a long moment then lowered just his eyes to look down into my left eye. “I’d rather be fishing,” I said, watching the corner of his mouth twitch.

“Hush,” he said softly.

“It’s the truth.”

“The truth won’t set you free here and now. Now be quiet and get in line. The mourners are filing in. You behave yourself. Try to be a little lady.”

“They don’t teach you nothin’ like that in school. But I can guestimate the number of mourners for you.”

“Guestimate how many lashes Pa will give you if you don’t shush up.”

“I hate Jimmy,” I said and was surprised when he suddenly grabbed me above the elbow and shook me as if I was a ragdoll. “Hey!” I cried.

“You take that back!” he flared.

“Joseph!” It was mother’s voice wedging itself between us like a physical force. He glanced at her then gave my arm a last shake and let go. I shot him a sullen glare then went to stand beside my eleven-year old brother Jesse, taking my place at the end of the line of my immediate family members. My Grandmama Agnes was sitting in a straight chair, her hands clutching her black purse on her lap. Beside her Grandpa James, whom Jimmy had been named after, rocked a bit in his chair, humming to himself. His eyes looked sort of glassy, like my father’s did when he’d been down to Bobby’s Bar and Grill on a Saturday night and came back stumbling and mumbling, ready to lash out at anyone who got in between him and his bed. Beyond them was Grandmama Frances who was widowed, then my various aunts, uncles and cousins who kind of kept their distance from us.

I stared at the ugly patterned carpet for several long minutes, then looked over at the people in the long line who’d come to gawk at Jimmy in his casket. You’d never know he had a big hole in his chest from the shotgun he’d used. I’d heard Anita talking on the phone to a friend two nights after he’d killed himself saying that of course he wouldn’t have blown his head off because he was vain of his good looks and wouldn’t want people gaping at a monster with broken teeth and shattered cheekbones. I’d had a nightmare that same night, Jimmy coming out of his room all bloody with his jaw hanging loose, one eye dangling from its socket, his teeth all jagged as he  reached for me with bloodstained hands, trying to say my name with a torn tongue flopping around in his messed up mouth. I’d screamed bloody murder, waking the whole house. Mama had come in and slapped my face hard, the pain startling me into silence. She’d said, “That’s enough out of you!” then turned and walked out without offering a comforting gesture or word. It had been Joey who’d climbed into my bed and held me, rocking me because when the shock of being struck had worn off I’d found myself crying and shaking like a leaf, still afraid Jimmy was out in the hallway waiting to grab me when I left my room and drag me to Hell, which was where people who killed themselves went directly.

I stood there squirming a little, barely tolerating being patted and petted, hugged and kissed by a bunch of people I barely knew and many I had never seen before in my life. One younger woman not much older than Johnny, who was twenty-one, had crouched down to fix a bow at the end of one of my strawberry-blonde braids, getting herself eye level with me. I stared at her and she stared at me until finally she said, “Well, there you are,” as if I had been absent from my body and had stepped back inside just that moment. She stood up and moved away, my head turning to follow her black suit. She had long red hair. I wanted to follow her, ask her what her name was and why she had come. How had she known my brother? I frowned. She was the only person in the room moving in my field of vision. Everyone around me seemed frozen in a tableau and even the sound had been stilled in the room. The young woman had turned her head to look back at me over her shoulder. Her shiny lips formed an enigmatic smile before she turned away again just as the sound and motion in the room resumed with a slightly jarring effect on my nerves. I drew a breath, having realized that I had been holding it since she’d tied my bow.

“Who’s she?” I asked Jesse.

“Who’s she who?” he answered, looking disinterested, bored, if truth be told.

“The redhead.”

“Dunno,” he said with a shrug.

“Bet she’s a witch,” I murmured. He gave me a skeptical look then turned his head away. “She just cast a spell on me.”

“Ha,” he said shortly. “Waste of time, you ask me.”

“You two shut up,” Joey hissed, scowling at me in particular.

“I’ve gotta pee,” I said. Joey narrowed his eyes, his mouth going flat before he pointed to the door. Freed by his signal I stitched a meandering path through the gathered mourners, dodging elbows and knees but bumping into a few people I couldn’t see on my right.

In the wide hallway there were groups of people milling about, talking quietly. I caught bits and pieces of their conversations, gathering the words ‘shame’, ‘disgrace’, ‘suicide’, ‘beatings’ and ‘angry man’ in my ears before a man in a black suit called me by name saying, “Jennie, can I help you?”

“I’ve got to pee,” I told him bluntly.

“I’ll show you to the ladies room. Come with me.” I followed him into a side hall, then right into another corridor. “Here you are. Can you find your way back or would you like me to wait here for you?”

I frowned. Did he think I was an idiot, too stupid to find my way back to the big noisy room where my brother lay in his casket like a statue with his heart all blown to smithereens? “I can find my own way,” I said. Then I added, “Thank you kindly,” because the walls have ears everywhere.

“Very good.” He turned and walked away. I twisted the knob and let myself into the bathroom to do what I had to do.

I’d finished what I’d come to do but was still sitting there, craning my neck, looking at the pictures hung on the walls of the little bathroom when the door opened and the redhead in the black suit walked in. She looked at me then said, “So sorry, the door wasn’t locked.”

“You can come in. I’m done.” For some reason the toilet paper was farther away than I could reach. She noticed me stretching forward and closed the door, locking it, then came and spun the roll, tearing off a half dozen or so sheets, folding them then handing the tissue to me. “Don’t watch,” I said. She seemed almost amused by my sudden shyness but turned and looked at her reflection in the mirror over the sink, opening her small black purse, taking out a tube of lipstick and applying a little to her lips. It was, I realized, colorless. “What’s that stuff?” I asked as I slid off the toilet and pulled my panties up.

“This? It’s lip gloss. Want some?” She turned back to me. I was tugging down the skirt of my dress but it was being stubborn, caught in the elastic of my underpants behind me. “Here, hold this a second. Let me help you with that.” She handed me the tube, set her purse on the edge of the sink then crouched down, reaching around me to ease my skirt out of the elastic and smooth it down. “There you go!” she said cheerfully. “Now, push your lips out. Make a face like a fish.”

“Like this?” I puckered up like a fish.

“Perfect!” She took the tube of lip gloss back, opened it then cupped my chin in one hand while rubbing the glossy stick over my lips. “Now, fold your lips in and move them side to side a bit to smooth it out, like this.” She demonstrated and I copied her, feeling suddenly grown up. Anita wore lipstick sometimes but she’d never let me try any on and probably couldn’t be bothered showing me what to do. “Very nice.”

“Do you need to pee before I flush? It saves water.”

“No, thank you, suagr. Go ahead. I just ducked in to comb my hair and check my lips.”

I flushed. She moved aside after turning on the water so I could wash my hands. “Are you a witch?” I blurted out figuring I might as well ask while I had the opportunity.

“A witch? No! What a strange question.”

“My papa saw a woman with red hair like yours once once and said she was a witch. A bad one.”

“Well, maybe she was. But I’m not.”

“Oh.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I was hoping you rode here on a broom and might be inclined to take me for a ride.”

She laughed. “Sorry. I rode over in a Honda Civic.”

“My mistake,” I murmured. “Pardon me.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “People mistake me for a witch all the time, if truth be told.” I looked up at her. Her eyes had mischief in them. “Maybe there’re a lot of witches with red hair. What do you think?”

“Red hair and green skin,” I said, nodding.

“And warts. Witches have warts, don’t they?”

“Big ugly ones on their chins or noses.”

“Well, are we all done in here?” she asked. There were voices in the corridor outside the door, other women needing to use the bathroom. I nodded. She unlocked the door and we stepped out. “Excuse us please. Pardon us, ladies!” she said, wending a path through the half dozen or so women filling the narrow corridor. “Why don’t we sneak outside for a breath of fresh air,” the redhead said. That sounded enticing to me, so I followed her.

We exited into a garden at the side of the funeral home. She walked down a brick path and I trailed behind her like an obedient puppy. When we reached a bench she sat down, patted the place beside her. I pulled myself up, feet dangling to sit beside her. She opened her purse, took out a pack of cigarettes and a slim lighter. “Bad me,” she said, shaking one slender white cigarette from the pack, putting it between her freshly glossed lips, then flicking a flame to life and applying it to the blunt end. Little puffs of smoke drifted upward. She inhaled deeply then blew the smoke out through her nose like a dragon. I sat watching her smoke for nearly a full minute. Finally she said, “That’s better,” then crushed the butt out on the edge of the bench, looked around, and shrugged before tucking the extinguished cigarette back into her bag. “I’m not a litterer,” she said.

“Good.” I was suddenly at a loss for words, which was unusual for me to say the least. I wracked my brains then asked, “What’d you say your name was?”

“I didn’t say. My name is Stephanie,” she replied. “And you’re Jennie. I recognized you because of the patch.” She pointed to her own eye. “Jim told me all about your accident when you were little.”

“You know my brother?”

“I knew him,” she said, correcting my verb tense. “We met at Renny’s.” My eyebrows rose at the mention of Renny’s Roadhouse. Even my father didn’t go there. I didn’t know my brother had ever gone there! “He’d come and shoot pool with the bikers. He was pretty good with a cue. Sometimes he won a little money, sometimes he lost some. He played a little Keno and won more than he lost. He was lucky like that.” She smiled wistfully. “Sometimes we’d dance a little and sometimes we’d just sit at a table and talk over a beer or two.” A window had just been thrown open in my mind. My oldest brother went to bars and talked to girls, drank beer, played pool and danced. It was like he’d led a secret life I’d just been made privy to. On the farm he’d milked the cows, drove the tractor out into the fields, sheered the few sheep we had left, picked tomatoes and corn, or whatever crop had come in, mended fences and ran irrigation lines. He’d never said much, not even at dinner, but I’d heard him and Papa, and especially Henry, one of the hired hands, yelling at one another in the barn quite often when I’d been chasing chickens or running from the mean goose that was always wanting to bite me. “He gave me the money he won to hold for him. He said your father would just take it and piss it away on beer and whisky.” Her eyes met my eye, giving me a long look before she said, “I mean, he would just spend it like water.” I nodded. “I was going to give it to your family this evening, or tomorrow after the funeral.”

“What for?”

“It was Jimmy’s money. I really ought to give it to your folks.” I was shaking my head. “No? Well, why not?”

“He gave it to you.”

“Only to keep it safe.”

“Well, how much money is it?”

“Oh, around five thousand dollars, I’d say.” That seemed like an awful lot of money to me. I was lucky if I saw a few dollars in a month’s time. I mostly earned my pocket money selling vegetables at the farm stand. People told me to keep the change, or slipped a dollar into my hand as they were leaving. I liked it when I got money like that. I was like a squirrel hiding acorns with the change and dollar bills, hiding the money in an old Smucker’s jelly jar under a loose floorboard underneath my bed, where I also had my mama’s clip on earrings she’d left on her dresser after Grampapa’s funeral two years ago, my papa’s old comb with the missing teeth he’d left on the edge of the bathtub one night, a matchbook belonging to Henry he’d dropped in the yard. I had Jimmy’s baby teeth in an envelope under my bed, having found them in the desk drawer yesterday when looking for a stamp for a note my Mama had written. “Your folks could probably use the money.”

“Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “You can keep it.”

“You’re a little on the young side to be giving me permission to keep your big brother’s pool earnings.”

I made a face, kicking my legs faster so I was in imminent danger of launching myself right off the bench. “Papa’d only spend it like you said.  It wouldn’t really do none of us no good.”

“So what do you think I should do with the money then?” she asked.

I stared at the flower bed across from the bench until the flowers all blurred together in pools of bright colors. What should she do with the money? I didn’t know. I didn’t have a lot of experience managing money. I only bought a box of Cracker Jack at the grocery store once in a while. “Just put it in the bank,” I finally concluded. “For a rainy day.” I’d heard my Mama say that from time to time, that she was settin’ a few dollars aside for a rainy day. I jumped off the bench and nearly fell but she bent forward, grabbing me by the sash of my dress.

“Be careful!”

I regained my balance then turned back toward her. She was watching me. I thought she was the prettiest girl I’d ever laid eyes on. No wonder Jimmy’d liked dancing with her. “Were you his girlfriend?” I asked, little dots finally connecting in my head to form a picture.

“I suppose you could say that. He trusted me more than he trusted anyone else. We were good friends.”

“Did he kiss you?”

“That’s a rather personal question, honey.” She tilted her head back, looking up at a mockingbird sitting above us running through his repertoire of songs. Her eyes shimmered in the dying light of the day. “Yeah, we kissed. It was so nice. He always treated me like a real lady.” She blinked rapidly then looked down, opening her purse. “You want a stick of gum?” I nodded and she dug one out for me, then one for herself. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Miss Jennie,” she said, snapping her purse shut. “I’ll put Jimmy’s money in a separate bank account where it’ll be safe and earn a teeny bit of interest every month. Pennies, that’s all the bank gives you nowadays for saving money. But pennies add up over time slow but surely.” She gave me a long solemn look. “You sure have grown up to be a pretty little girl. Breaks my heart, it does, about your poor eye.”

“Accidents happen,” I said with a one-shouldered shrug.

She reached out, grabbed my wrist and pulled me so that I was standing right in front of her. Her eyes held mine. “I’ll save Jimmy’s money for you. When you’re all grown up you come and find me and I’ll give it to you. It’ll be all yours. But don’t you tell a soul about it, okay? It’ll be our secret. Promise?” I nodded although I must have looked confused because she pulled me close and hugged me. “It’s going to be all right, sugar,” she said softly. “He never should have left us like this.”

“No,” I agreed. He never should have.

“He had so many chances to make everything right, the way it should have been. We’d talked about it often enough but my father was so angry with him still. He still won’t speak to me. Such a long time to hold a grudge!” She shook her head. “But that’s not your worry, is it? Of course not,” she said, answering her own question.

“Jennie.” It was Johnny. He’d come up the path just now, startling us both. “My sister should be inside,” he said to Stephanie.

“Your sister wanted a breath of fresh air,” she replied.

“Well she’s had it and now she needs to come back inside with me. And you should go.”

“I have a right to be here,” she said, giving me one last quick hug before letting go. “But I’m ready to go. So, you go on now, Jennie. I have to get home, but you remember what I said.”

Johnny took my hand and led me back along the path. “You stay away from her,” he warned me.

“She’s not a witch. I asked her.”

“There are all kinds of bad people in the world, not just witches.”

“Is she a bad person?” I asked, jogging to keep up with his long stride. He didn’t answer me. “Well, is she?” I asked again as we reached the side door of the funeral home.

He stopped and looked down at me and I could see he didn’t really know how to answer my question. “Look what happened to Jimmy,” he said.

“He shot himself.”

“Well, he had to have had some reason to, right?”

“Was he sad about Stephanie?” I asked, and he stiffened, looked at me then looked away. “Did she say she wouldn’t dance with him and he got sad because he thought she’d never dance with him again so he shot his wounded heart so it wouldn’t hurt him no more?”

He suddenly bent down, picked me up and held me close. “There were a lot of things that were making him sad, not just any one thing in particular. But you know what? You never made him sad. You always made him happy, didn’t you? You always made Jimmy smile. You were his little sunshine girl.”

Jimmy always sang You Are my Sunshine when we were alone together, taking a walk down the road to see the ducks on the fire pond at Chapman’s farm, or when he let me ride on his lap on the tractor putting his John Deere cap on my head so that it covered my eye, or when he’d come and tuck me in at night, smelling of hay, cows and sweat. “I’m gonna miss him something fierce,” I said, my eyes flooding with hot tears. “I’m sure gonna miss him bad!”

And I finally let go of my anger and cried for James Alan Lacroix, my heart broken at the loss of him and the loss of all the love he’d shown me every day of my life.

Second Chance

Second Chance by Susan Buffum (copyright by Susan Buffum, 2019)

“Have a seat,” said the red-haired girl with the incredible jade green eyes.

“Where the hell am I?” he asked as he watched her in her tattered amber gown sweep soot and ashes from a granite bench near a fire pit.

“Precisely,” she replied, dusting off her delicate white hands then looking at them, frowning. She sighed, shrugged and then wiped her grimy hands down the stained amber fabric covering her thighs. Glancing at her palms and fingertips again she seemed satisfied that her hands were clean enough and motioned for him to sit. “Please, sit. There’s a long line ahead of you. You might as well relax while you can.”

“Where am I and who are you?” he asked as he looked down at the bench that still had grains of soot and flakes of ash on it. He bent and began to blow the debris off, but almost as soon as it was gone more settled on the polish granite and he began to look peeved.

“Stop wasting your breath,” she said, and then she covered her mouth with the fingers of her left hand as she tried to suppress a giggle. “As if you have any left, really.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded, feeling suddenly surly with annoyance. He craned his neck, looking around but it was dark and he thought he might be out in the woods still but not at the party he had been attending. He shook his head, wondering if he’d had too much to drink, or if someone had slipped something into his beer. He felt a little off. Had he gone into the woods to take a piss behind a tree and gotten himself turned around and ended up at some after prom party? He hadn’t gone to the prom but a lot of other seniors had. He turned back around and looked at the girl again but he definitely did not recognize her. He was pretty sure that he’d have known her if he’d seen her before with that short, spiky red hair, although it looked good on her, kind of sassy, he thought, unable to keep his lips from curving in a smile as his gaze traveled down her petite but alluring form. The hem of her gown was torn and ragged, exposing her bare feet. “Where’d you lose your shoes?” he asked, admiring her slender ankles.

“Stand up, turn around and bend over because I think one of them might be lodged up your ass.” His eyes rose abruptly to meet hers. She had a stern expression on her face. Her face was fox-like, he noticed. “From kicking your ass,” she added.

“Did you kick my ass? A little bitch like you? I’m over a foot taller than you and probably outweigh you by seventy pounds.”

“Sixty two pounds, nine and three quarters ounces,” she spat out.

“Explain to me how a little squirt like you kicked my ass.” He crossed his arms and glared at her, tired of this nonsense already. “I need to get back to the party I’m at. Yours is kind of sparse as far as friends go. Where is everybody?”

“They’re already trough. I held you back.”

“Held me back. Yeah, well, a lot of my teachers wanted to hold me back but there was nothing they could do about it because I got good grades. And now I’m graduating in June. Fuck them.”

“No, you’re not graduating,” she said, shaking her head. “You blew it, buddy. No diploma for you.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

She began moving, circling around behind him. She’d circled him six times before he reached out and grabbed her delicate wrist, pulling her to a stop. “I mean you’re dead,” she said, raising her hands, making several odd gestures.

It was a moment before he realized that he had been gripping her wrist but now she was waving her hands around like a magician or conjurer. He looked at his hands. “How did you do that?” he asked.

“Your physical body has no substance here.”

“But I grabbed your wrist!”

“Your mind just hasn’t grasped the concept that you’re rather insubstantial now.” She began circling him again. “Do you want to know why I herded everyone else through the door and then swung it shut, but kept you here on this side?”

“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing here but this is really too weird for my taste. I have to get back to my own friends.”

“They’re busy. They haven’t even noticed that you’ve gone missing. Really, Drake, heroin? Did you really believe you were invincible? That it couldn’t kill you? Everybody dies. That’s the rule. No one escapes death. Not even you. Your four minutes are falling from the top of the hour glass called Drake Carter’s Life grain by grain into the bottom of the hour glass. When the last grain falls, I have no choice but to open the door and usher you through it, and then slam it shut behind you. That’s called sealing your fate. Ever hear of that?”

“I’ve heard the phrase,” he replied, feeling somewhat uneasy.  The girl was more than a little strange. “Do you mind telling me who you are? Are you the death fairy? Sort of like the tooth fairy from the dark side? Instead of leaving a dollar under the pillow you take a soul and what? Keep it in a jar on a shelf in your creepy little cottage?” He shook his head. “What’s your name?”

“Oh, I have a lot of names but most people just call me, Essie, short for Second Chance.” He chuffed an amused laugh mostly through his nose. “I’m your last and best hope. I’m your miracle, Drake. Do you believe in miracles?”

“”I’m eighteen years old. It’s a miracle I haven’t been killed while texting and driving. It’s a miracle I haven’t been shot by some psycho with an assault rifle intent on taking a whole gang with him when he blows his brains out in the school cafeteria, or the gym or the library—wherever he goes to hole up when he runs out of ammo or his gun jams. It’s a miracle someone hasn’t shot me in a fit of road rage because I braked to make a right hand turn and slowed them down! My life is full of goddam miracles.”

“It certainly wasn’t any miracle that you ended your own life shooting shit into your vein like you did.” Her tone and the look of disgust in her green eyes caused him to look away, to feel a frisson of apprehension about his situation because it was becoming more apparent to him by the moment that something was happening to him that was so far out of the norm it was making him feel off balance and frightened. “Drake!” she said sharply, causing him to look at her again. He watched as she slipped two fingers into the bodice of her gown, down between her breasts in that hollow where a female’s heat and scent resided. How many times had he nuzzled a girl’s neck and then her throat and then let his lips roam down to that enticing place framed by the V of a low cut sweater’s neckline? “This is what you need,” she said, withdrawing a pen-like object from that enticing space.

“What the hell is that? An Epi-pen?”

“It’s a naloxone auto-injector pen. It can reverse the respiratory depression that’s more or less suffocated you. You’re dead. It just happened. In four minutes your death will be irreversible. This won’t save you.” She shook the pen-like device in his face. “Three minutes and fifty-nine seconds to be precise.” She tucked the device back down between her breasts and then waved her arms as if she could direct the black clouds in the dark sky.

His eyebrows rose as an opening did appear in the clouds overhead, allowing a beam of pure white light to shine down on the ground at his feet. “That’s a cool trick,” he murmured.

“Just watch your life. It’s going to flash by fairly quickly,” she said.

“What?”

“Look!” She pointed down at the illuminated oval sphere between his feet.

He looked down and saw shadows moving inside the sphere. As he watched they gradually came more clearly into focus. He recognized his parents but they looked younger. His mother was holding a blue blanket wrapped bundle, smiling. His father was leaning over the bed, grinning ear to ear. His mother moved the blanket aside to reveal the baby’s face and Drake reacted to seeing his familiar infant visage. There had been dozens of pictures of him in every room of the house when he was growing up. He had finally convinced his mother to put the damn things away when he was eleven and wanted to have friends over. She had taken down the pictures and put them into albums that she kept in her bedroom. “I was kind of cute,” he said.

“You’re not so cute now with purple lips and a blue nose, ashen skin,” she said, making him grimace. “Keep watching.”

It did go fast. Eighteen years flew by in what seemed like only a heartbeat. “I really haven’t lived much,” he observed. He hadn’t even graduated from high school yet.

“No, you hadn’t lived much at all. You really only just reached legal adult status, although you were still three years away from being able to drink legally.” Her tone was wry. He had been drinking beer since he was fourteen. That had led to smoking pot at sixteen. And now he’d been trying heroin at his friend Jake’s insistence that it was amazing stuff. “You’d only had sex five times this year with a female. I’m not counting all the times you were alone.” He scowled at her and then looked away, somewhat horrified that she knew this much about his intimate business. “You’re not going to college. You’re never going to fall in love. You’re never going to walk on the beach again. You’re never going to have sex again. You will never get married. You will never be a father. You will not teach a son to ride a bike or play hockey. You will not pace the house waiting for your daughter to come home from a first date. You won’t kiss boo-boos and make them better. You won’t buy a new car, get a good job, buy a house, put in a pool, take another vacation, win the lottery, kiss your mother, hang out with your father, celebrate Christmas or your birthday.”

“All right!” he shouted, jumping up off the bench and walking away. “I hear you!” He walked into the deep shadows until he began to shiver. There was a sense of panic eating away at him from the inside now. “How do I fix this?” he asked. He turned and the panic flooded him—she was gone! He was alone in this place he now had some vague understanding must be limbo. He was in limbo—balanced between life and death. She had said that he was dead but there was a four minute window before he was dead dead. “Second Chance!” he shouted, striding back into the area where the bench stood. “Essie! Miss Chance! Hey! Miracle girl! Where are you?”

“Be quiet and sit down. It’s a busy night,” she said as she came out of the deepest shadows, guiding a girl with long brown hair by the hand. “Go through this door,” she told the girl. The girl hesitated a moment and then crossed the threshold. Second Chance swung the door shut.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Is she going to hell, too? What did she do? I mean, she looked younger than me!”

“She was thirteen years old. She just hung herself a few minutes ago. You didn’t see the mark on her neck?”

“Uh, no. Her hair was hanging down.”

“Bullied,” she said, sounding disgusted again. “Sometimes I hate my job with a burning passion!”

He dropped down onto the bench again, feeling drained. “Can I ask you something?”

“If you’d like.”

“Do you work for, uh, you know, the devil? Are you sort of the door person to the other side? You kick everyone through and slam the door behind them?”

“Sometimes.” She looked at him and something touched her inside. “Look, the thirteen year old? Different doorway. She’s heading upstairs. There’re some stops along the way. Everybody is sorted out in the end.”

“Don’t you mean judged?”

“No, they get sorted first and then they get judged. If judgement declares you go elsewhere it’s a direct path there, and that’s it. It’s final.”

“Why’d you stop me and keep me back?”

“I told you, some people get second chances. You happen to be the lucky winner of the second chance lottery tonight.”

“Okay, so how does this work?”

She raised her face, eyes traveling up to the dark clouds. “Three minute warning. You’ve been without oxygen for sixty seconds.”

“Fuck!” he cried. “I can’t hold my breath that long!”

“Don’t you dare use that kind of language here! I find it highly offensive and if you persist, I might renege on this chance and shove you through the other door and be done with you! Really! Show some respect not only for me but for yourself!”

“It’s how everybody talks these days,” he muttered.

“So that makes it all right?” She came up to him, grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back until he was looking up into her flashing green eyes. “I thought you had a brain. I thought you had a backbone and guts. I was wrong. You’re no different from any of the others I’ve shown through the door!”

“I am different!” he protested. “I’m sitting here and you’re giving me a second chance! You must have seen some redeeming quality in me! You must have seen something!” he cried.

“I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before. No big deal.” She abruptly let go of his hair and stepped back. He grabbed for her wrists but her wrists went right through his fists.
“Hey! No!” he cried, jumping up onto his feet. “How long has it been? How many minutes and seconds do I have left? Let me prove to you that I’m worth this chance! Please! Don’t offer me a chance and then yank it out from underneath me because I used one bad word! It’s everywhere in the world! I just said it because I’ve heard it so often it has no meaning to me! I’m sorry if it offended you. Really. I’m sorry.”

“It’s crude and vulgar.”

“Okay. Fine. I will never say it again. I promise!”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said.

“Okay then, I will try never to say that word again but I can’t promise you that it won’t slip out from time to time. I will try to control my urge to say it. Is that all right with you?” She nodded. “Can I ask you something?”

“The sand is still falling grain by grain...”

“Yeah, yeah! I know! I just want to ask you if you were ever alive. Were you? I mean, you look like you’re wearing a prom gown. Did you die in an accident on prom night?”

She turned her back to him but he could tell he’d hit a nerve in her. She wasn’t soulless after all. She had feelings. “I’m not at liberty to discuss this with you.”

“You must have been one feisty girl. I mean, the way you were talking to me, it was like you weren’t going to take crap from me no how, no way.”

“Drake, stop. This is about you. Not me.”

“But I want to know. How’d you get this job?”

“You’ve got two minutes and forty-five seconds,” she said.

“Tell me in fifteen seconds or less. I need to know what happened to you.”

“I have one minute and thirty seconds left,” she replied, “and then I will be shown through one or the other of the doors by you if you fail to...”

He stood stock still for a moment and then approached her. “Are you saying that you’re not dead yet? That somehow you got this job from the last person who had it? Am I supposed to take over from you when you’re officially dead?”

“I was at my cousin’s wedding. This is a bridesmaid’s gown. I was one of her bridesmaids. I was supposed to ride with the other bridesmaids in a limo but I wasn’t feeling well after the photo shoot in the park and they left without me. I’d been stung by a bee in the rose garden. This guy, a friend of Tom’s, the groom, he offered to drive me to the reception. I was having trouble breathing. He drove me to the emergency room and kind of just dumped me out the door and took off. He was scared. I’m not sure what’s happening because when I stopped breathing I was here and no longer there, just like you were no longer at the party. You were here. And it’s weird because I instinctively know who goes where and why. But I didn’t know when you came across. I just suddenly knew about second chances.”

He nodded and slipped his hand into his back pocket. “I hear you. And I have this on me, so maybe this was meant to be. You have that naloxone pen thingy and I have this.” He held out a similar looking item. “I have a peanut allergy,” he said. “I always carry an Epi-pen. That’s what I thought you had. But it turns out I have what you need and you have what I need, so maybe we should swap?”

She was looking at the injector he was holding out to her. A lot was going on in her head, evidently, but then she sort of gasped. “I have forty seconds left,” she said, her voice wavering. She quickly plucked the naloxone injector back out. “I carry this because my brother is a user and he’s overdosed before. He was one of the ushers and I was afraid he’d be shooting up at the reception and would screw up there and need this.”

“It’s a crazy world.”

“Drake, don’t ever use heroin again. If you’re addicted...”

“It was the first time and believe me, if I live, it will be the last.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, I promise. Here, you need this. Your time is almost up.”  He popped the cap off. “Hike your skirt up.” He crouched down before her, helping her get the long skirt of her gown up high enough to expose the front of her thigh so he could use the Epi-pen. She flinched slightly as he jammed it into her skin and the medication was injected into her.

“Hurry up! Get up! Lift up your shirt!” she said quickly. He stood up, tugging his shirt up. She fumbled as she unfastened his jeans and tugged them low on his hips. Her green eyes met his for a brief moment before she administered the naloxone in this abdomen.

“Chance! How old are you? Where do you live? What’s your real name?” he called through the sudden fog that rose up between them. “Chance!” Hey!”

She could be anybody from anywhere, he thought as he lay in the ER treatment room trying to remember her face. The world was a huge place.

“You’re a damned lucky young man,” the doctor said, from the doorway of the room he was in. “Another minute or so and your parents would have been grieving the loss of you. I’m admitting you for the night and we’ll see how you’re doing in the morning.”

“Who found me?” he asked. He couldn’t remember anything about that.

“When you went unresponsive one of your friends had the intelligence and foresight to call nine eleven. Fortunately for you there’d been a fire just down the road. Truck three was on its way back and another of your friends ran to the road to flag it down. They got to you pretty quickly or else, like I said, your parents would be devastated right now. They’re in the waiting room. You up to seeing them?”

“Bee sting,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?” he asked.

“I thought you said bee sting. It’s an odd thing to say. But then again, you had an Epi-pen in your hip pocket. Are you allergic to bee stings?” He looked down at the chart, his eyebrows bending together over the bridge of his nose. “Your mother told us that you have a peanut allergy.”

“Yeah, I’m deathly allergic to peanuts.”

 He hesitated and then said, “I could have sworn you said bee sting, but maybe you heard one of the nurses talking. We treated a girl earlier who had an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting.”

“Redhead?”

Again the doctor looked taken aback. “As a matter of fact...” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss other patients with you. It’s a privacy issue.”

“Yeah, I understand. Can you tell me if she was admitted or not?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

Drake spent the night, receiving further treatment. Mid-morning the floor doctor came in and told him that he would be going home soon, but he was referring him for drug counseling. “I’m never touching that stuff again,” he said.

“Nevertheless, you need to go to this counseling to avoid an arrest for possession of a narcotic and drug paraphernalia. It’s your first offense. You nearly died. This counseling avenue keeps you out of the criminal justice system. You get this one shot at having no record. You mess up again and you’re just a number in their system.”

“I hear you. I’ll go.”

“Good idea. You can get up and walk around. Just tie your gwn shut so you’re not mooning the nurses, although some of them wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t want them looking at my ass,” Drake said.

“Your mother’s coming with clean clothes. She’ll be here soon. The paperwork should be done by then and you’ll be free to go. Stay clean, son.”

“I will.” The doctor nodded and left the room.

Drake pushed aside the covers and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Hospital gowns were the worst thing ever invented, he thought. He fumbled with the various ties and snaps until he was fairly certain nothing was hanging out. The little slipper socks were hardly high fashion either but he had nothing else. Reaching up, he finger combed his tangled hair as he walked a bit unsteadily to the door and stopped, peering out into the corridor. There was no one around, except down by the nurse’s station.

Stepping out into the hallway he began a slow walk up one side of the corridor and then back down the other, casually glancing into each room. Most of them were occupied by older people, senior citizens. He made it to the far end, then crossed and entered the other corridor that ran parallel to the one his room was in.

In the third room from the elevator he caught a glimpse of red hair and he stopped. He wasn’t certain it was her. He had a vague idea of what she had looked like- fox like. This girl was chubby-cheeked and her skin was blotchy. She had oxygen tubing in her nose, was sitting up, staring out the window. Her hair was spikey. It seemed familiar. “Hi,” he said from the doorway. “Bee sting girl?”

She turned her head and looked at him. The first thing that struck him was the color of her eyes. Jade green. They were very vivid even from this distance. “Heroin overdose guy?” she asked a bit hesitantly.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

“If you want to. I’m all itchy hives and rash.”

“Yeah, you look like hell.” He came further into the room. “Of course I hardly look GQ worthy in this less than flattering attire.”

Her eyes traveled up to the top of his head then down to his sock-clad feet. She had to lean forward a bit to see his feet. Her eyes met his again on the way back up. “Charming. But we match.” She indicated her own gown. It was the same color, the same pattern as his. “How embarrassing to show up wearing the same gown.”

He quirked a smile. “My name’s Drake. Drake Carter.”

“Like the duck.”

“Yeah. Guess it’s a little better than Mallard.”

“Chance,” she said. “Chance Payton.”

“Chance, that’s an unusual name.”

“My father was scratching lottery tickets as my mother was trying to come up with a name for me. He won two thousand dollars on one of the tickets and said, ‘What’s the chance of that happening, me winning two thousand dollars on the day our baby girl was born?’ So Mom named me Chance and he agreed.”

“You from around here?’ he asked.

She shook her head. “No, I live in Waterbury. I was at a wedding photo shoot at Graystone Park here in town when I got stung by a bee. I was brought here.”

“You in high school or are you a college girl?”

She laughed. “Thanks, but no. I’m not in college. I’m a senior. I graduate this month.”

“Me, too. I’m from here.” He raised his hand, rubbing his nose, feeling suddenly way underdressed and awkward in her presence. He smiled nervously as he lowered his hand and she returned his smile. She seemed a lot calmer than he felt. “I had a weird experience,” he blurted out. Her smile faltered but her eyes met his and held them. “It’s all kind of vague now.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how to describe it.”

She continued to hold his gaze for a few moments longer and then she turned her head and looked out the window. “Me, too,” she said. “It’s strange but the moment you appeared in the doorway I felt like I knew you from someplace, like we’d just...I don’t know, been together. I thought it was a dream, but it was a really bizarre dream.” She frowned slightly and then she sighed. “You gave me an Epi-pen. How weird is that? I mean, how could that even be? I don’t even know you yet in my dream you pulled an Epi-pen out of your back pocket and administered it.”

He was silent, shaken by this confirmation that she had had a very similar dream or experience to his. “All right. Let me tell you this. I have a severe peanut allergy and I always have an Epi-pen on me. I carry it in my back pocket, usually. In my dream I gave a girl in an amber-colored gown an injection in her thigh.” She had gasped and her eyes had widened at this. Her hand rose from the covers and she shakily pointed at the narrow closet against the wall at the foot of the bed. “What?” he asked. “What’s the matter?’ He thought there might be a call button he needed to push for her on the wall although she had a call button on the bed controls. “Hey, are you all right?” Tears were trickling down her cheeks. “Chance?”

“Go look. Just go look inside,” she managed to say.

He slowly got up and went to the closet, glancing back at her as he touched the door handle. Her face was ashen pale beneath the blotchy hives still marring her complexion. He tugged open the door then slowly turned his head to look inside. “Holy shit,” he said, his voice sounding strangled because his throat had closed up, not from an allergic reaction but from strong emotion. Inside, hanging from a hook, was an amber gown. He reached in and touched the fabric but he already knew it would be satiny and soft. He’d touched this dress before, helping her hike it up to expose her thigh. “How can this be?” he murmured.

“Drake, what does this mean?” she asked, sounding almost scared.

He let go of the slinky material and slowly closed the door.  “We both more or less died last night. Somehow our spirits found one another’s. You were kind of bossy and in charge.”

“I’m a redhead, I can be that way sometimes.”

“You’d gotten there first, to this place we were at, and...”

“There was someone else there before me. I had to stay and she left through a door. I had to show people through the door but when you showed up...”

“You couldn’t open the door and let me go through.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I can’t remember much more about it.”

“You had a naloxone injector pen in the top of your dress. You jabbed me with it.” He laid his hand over his abdomen.

She was shaking her head. “I had one at the wedding but not in the top of my dress! It was in my bag. My...”

“Brother,” he said and her eyes met his again and held his gaze.

“Yes, my brother, Chase. He’s overdosed in the past. I carry one when I’m going to be someplace he is, just in case. He’s been to rehab a few times but he’s using again.” He could tell by the sound of her voice that she was upset about it. “Why would you inject that stuff into your body in the first place?” she asked, having looked away again.

“This friend of mine, he’d been after me to just try it. He said it was amazing stuff.”

“And you just believed him.”

“Yeah.” Her expression said it all. “I’m stupid, I know.”

“Not stupid. You must be smart enough to know better but you caved in to peer pressure just like Chase did.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m never touching it again.” She would not look at him. “You gave me a second chance, Chance. It was you. Of all the people you’d ushered through those doors in the, what, seconds you were put in charge by the previous doorkeeper, you chose me and stopped me. You must have seen or sensed something worth saving in me. Do you remember what that was?” he asked. “Why did you stop me and not just kick my ass through the f....”

“Hey!” she said sharply.

“Right, sorry.” He remembered now that she didn’t like that word. “I’m sorry. But why didn’t you kick me through that doorway to Hell?”

“Because you didn’t belong there!” She leaned back against the pillows, her hands gripping the bedcovers. “I can’t explain it!”

“Okay, then don’t try. You saw, heard or sensed something that made you believe I was worth intervening for. You had the naloxone pen. I had the Epi-pen. It worked out for both of us.” He ran a hand through his longish, tangled, dark hair. “Chance, I truly appreciate what you did.”

She was silent for a long time and then she asked, “If it was you in charge of the door, would you have given me a second chance?”

“In a heartbeat,” he replied as the nurse trundled in her stand to record Chance’s current vitals. “Should I leave?” he asked the nurse.

“No, although Jennifer is probably looking for you in your own room. You’re almost ready to be released.”

“Yeah, but. I was told I could take a walk. I just stopped in to visit Chance for a few.”

“I didn’t realize that you knew her,” the nurse said.

Drake’s eyes met Chance’s. “I do, but we haven’t known one another all that long. I recognized her as I was passing by so thought I’d say hello,” he replied.

“Chance will probably be going home this evening.” She finished typing her notes and headed for the door. “It’s nice that you two know one another. Take it easy, both of you!”

Drake watched the nurse leave and then he turned back to Chance who was smoothing the bedclothes. “Um...” he said, uncertain how to proceed. She looked up. “Uh, what do you think about maybe keeping in touch? I mean, I don’t know if you’re in a relationship or anything. I’m not. Nothing serious anyway.”

“I’m not seeing anyone right now.”

“So, you want to give me your cell number? I’ll call you?”

“All right.” She indicated a small pad of paper and a pen on the bedside table next to the tissue box. “Write your number down for me and I’ll give you mine.”

“I have a car. My Mom bought a new car last year. It’s a Honda Accord. Not new, but not in bad shape.”

“So basically you have a car and you drive.”

He laughed self consciously. “Yeah.”

“Good, because I can’t afford a car yet. I’ll probably be taking the bus to college in the fall.”

“Where are you going?”

“Community college here,” she answered. “My parents can’t afford anything else. I’m the baby of the family. They’re pretty much tapped out after putting my older brothers through college.”

“Do you have any sisters?” She shook her head. “So you’re the only girl in the family?”

“Yes.”

“That explains your no nonsense attitude then. You don’t take crap from guys.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good.” He wrote down his cellphone and home telephone numbers. “I’ll be working for my uncle’s landscaping business this summer. That’s what I’ll be studying at the same college you’re going to. Business and they have some horticulture and landscaping courses. My Uncle Henry is grooming me to take over his company.  He doesn’t have any kids so he’s adopted me and I’ve been working for him summers since I was twelve years old.” He handed the pen to her. “What are you going for?”

“Administrative Assistant.”

He nodded. “Cool. Maybe I’ll hire you to help me run the business one day.”

“Your uncle might have a say in that.”

“My uncle has cancer so he might not be around for many more years. He’s getting treatment but it’s spread. I’m going to take as many courses as I can for as long as I can before he has to stop working. He’s doing okay, has good and bad days. I’m hoping I can get my Associates degree before he bows out.” He shook his head. “Pretty heavy conversation here for just having met you.”

“It’s all right. Maybe our chance meeting was meant to be, Drake. You never know. Maybe you will need me to help you manage and run the business. Does your aunt work there?”

“He never married. He’s got some guys who’ve been with him for years but he’s been running the business himself.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, maybe I can talk to him and tell him you want to help out in the office. You think you could work part time and take courses, too? He can start teaching you stuff so when the time comes you’ll be familiar with things and I’ll be able to trust you to do stuff like pay the bills, cut the paychecks and send out the statements so I can be more hands on in the greenhouse and landscape design areas.”

Chance suddenly grinned. “That would be awesome, Drake. Even if he pays me minimum and I only work maybe 16 hours a week or so I’d be able to save that money toward a car.”

“I think he’s coming over tonight, that is if my stupid stunt hasn’t upset my parents too much and they’ve canceled Sunday night dinner. If they’ve canceled then I’ll call him during the week. After I talk to hm I’ll call you and let you know what he says.” She nodded. “Hey, before I go, I’ll call you anyway during the week. Do you maybe want to get together and do something next Saturday?”

“That would be nice. But I have to tell you, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs, and I don’t jump into bed with a guy until I feel comfortable enough for that. And I have never felt comfortable enough with anyone yet.”

He understood what she was telling him. “This has changed my life for the better. No more beer, not more drugs, I never smoked and don’t plan on taking it up. As for sex, well, let’s see how it goes. If and when you feel comfortable with me let me know and we’ll talk about it first. Sound good to you?”

“Sounds like a plan to me.” She looked at the numbers he’d written down then wrote her own cellphone number and home phone numbers on the pad, tore off the page and handed it to him. “Don’t lose that.”

“I won’t.” He had no pocket except for the pocket sewn into the center of the top of the gown but it had a hole in it for passing wires through. “I’ll just hold onto this for now.” He put the pad and pen back on the side table. “Well, I need to go before they send the dogs out in search of me.”

“Do you believe in fate?” she asked, reaching for his hand, catching it before he could turn away. Their eyes met, his hazel, hers an amazing shade of green. “I didn’t believe in it yesterday, but I am a firm believer today.”

“I am, too, a believer now.” His hand slid to hers and they laced their fingers together. “Thanks for seeing something in me worth saving.”

“Thanks for seeing something in me worth saving.”

He hesitated a long moment before bending quickly to kiss her swollen, blotchy cheek. “You look like a puffer fish,” he said.

“By next Saturday I should look like myself again.”

“Good. We’ll go someplace where there’re no bees.”

“Or peanuts.”

He shook his head. “You bring your Epi-pen and I’ll bring mine and we should be okay. You never know.”

“Will do.” She watched him walk to the door. He hesitated there and then turned back. “What?” she asked.

“This crazy thought just came into my head. Don’t take me wrong, but, if things work out for us, if this is fate, and we have a kid one day, what do you think we should name her?”

She gave him an incredulous look. “Really? That thought just came into your head?” He nodded. “Well, here’s another weird thing. I started thinking the same thing and you know what name came into my head just before you asked?”

“No, what name?”

“Destiny,” she replied.

He nodded. “That’s cool.” He raised his hand in which he held the paper with her numbers on it. “Talk to you soon. Hope you get to go home tonight.”

“Bye, Drake. Thanks for finding me.”

“I think I was meant to.”

He returned to his room, his heart feeling unusually light after such a life-changing experience. Chance. Fate. Destiny. How could it all have been merely a coincidence? He’d been essentially dead or nearly dead. So had she. They hadn’t known one another before last night, yet seeing her, talking to her this morning he felt as if he had known her longer than the less than four minutes he’d been with her in that twilight place between life and death.

It was possible that they had been discussing her while treating him and in his unconscious state he had conjured her up, worked her into a very bizarre near death dream, but that didn’t explain how he had known that she had red spikey hair like that and that she had been wearing an amber gown, unless he’d been semi-conscious when they’d brought him into the ER and he had caught a glimpse of Chance in another treatment room in passing but how would he have known about her brother being a user and that she carried naloxone like she did? That had nothing to do with anything, except he might have transferred the naloxone pen that an EMT had used on him to her but still, there had been the brother thing.

It was beyond his ability to comprehend and he decided he was not even going to try to understand what had happened to him last night. He would just accept it. That’s all he could do was accept it and move on with his life. But his life now included a girl named Chance, kind of ironic in and of itself. But Chance would always remind him that he’d been given a second chance at life, whether by her hand or by the hand of some higher being using her as an instrument to change his life.

Whatever had happened last night, he was pretty sure that Chance was going to be a part of his life for a long time to come, maybe to the end of his life here on earth.

 “Are you ready to go home?” his mother’s voice asked from the doorway. He looked up, looked at her pale, worried, haggard face, the shopping bag with clean clothes she had brought for him and then he did something that he had not done for a long, long time. He cried. “It’s all right, Drake,” she said, coming further into the room. “It’s going to be all right. Your father will certainly have something to say to you when he gets home tonight but we’ll get through this. You’ll go to those counseling and drug education sessions and we’ll put this behind us and move on.”

“Yeah, I’ll go, and we will.” He stood up, a piece of paper fluttering from his lap. “Oh,” he said.

“What’s that? A prescription?” she asked.

He laughed as he bent and picked it up. “This is a very important piece of paper. This is sort of a prescription. It’s a prescription for my future delivered to me by the hand of fate.” He walked up to her and took the bag from her hand. “I’ll get dressed and then, before we go, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Oh, good Lord, Drake! Have you been shamelessly flirting with the CNAs?”

“No! Nothing like that. I’ll explain it all to you later, or I’ll try.  This is a special girl and she’ll be going to the community college this fall.”  He shook his head. “I just want you to meet her and say hello.”

“Oh, all right!” she cried. “Go on, put your clothes on. I need to run to the grocery store before we go home and then I have laundry to do.”

He went into the bathroom to change, listening to her as she continued on with her list of things she needed to do before his father got home from work. He wasn’t too worried about his father reaming him out. They had a good relationship. He’d apologize, assure him it would never happen again, tell him he would do what he was supposed to do to avoid getting his name in the criminal justice system and then he’d tell him about this girl he’d met in the hospital. He hadn’t dated as much as his friends had through high school. His father had taken him aside several times, concerned about that. He’d told his father every time that he just hadn’t met the right girl yet, but that had changed. He’d finally met her.

Fate, he thought, was a pretty cool thing.