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Cathleen Daly
I THINK
The hospital is quiet.
There’s a difference between stillness and peace, I think.
It’s almost 2am. A machine beeps somewhere close by. The nurse station sits empty.
A coffee break, I think.
A series of ceiling lights click off automatically when no one is near. I look down the hall. A tunnel of darkness.
An Omen, I think.
There’s an empty gurney parked against the wall. I sit in an orange chair facing my daughter’s room.
A hopeful color, I think.
I see the outline of Cassie’s eleven-year-old face in the shadow of the partially closed door. A curtain is pulled between the two hospital beds. A girl, maybe seven, recovers in the next bed. “Swallowed a penny,” the nurse whispered earlier, passing me in the doorway. I stare at her long red hair, twisted and piled on top of her head like a dessert.
Looks uncomfortable, I think.
The nurse is back at her station. She picks up a clipboard. I hear her sneakers squeak on the linoleum floor as she disappears into a patient’s room. Cassie stirs in bed. The IV attached to her arm beeps. The nurse will make her way down the corridor, going room to room.
The graveyard shift, I think.
She’ll wake Cassie again, pricking my daughter’s small finger to check her blood sugar.
Cassie will ask me when she can go home – when it will all be over, I think.
In a few hours, the nurse will teach me how to give an insulin shot. I’ll practice on a stuffed teddy bear she tells me – one they save for training parents_._ I imagine an empty syringe piercing the soft fur.
I’ll have to look away, I think.
About the Writer:
Cathleen Daly is a writer living in Nashville, TN. “I Think” and “The Garden” are short pieces of micro nonfiction. She recently completed a memoir in glimpses (vignettes) about her mother, who died in 2018. Her words have appeared in print and online in Five Points Journal, Litro Magazine, Motherwell, Dreamer’s Creative Writing, The Griefcase, and Motherscope Magazine.
Image: The Nurse by Edgar Degas (1834-1917). No medium specified. No size specified. Uncrtain date between 1872 & 1873. Public domain.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
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