2: Doctor, Doctor, Will I Die?

This is part of my attempt at writing a “novel” or set of stories for #NaNoWriMo. Here is the link to the Table of Contents (Index), which will be a work in progress through November 2016.

He limped over to the table where she sat, waiting patiently, blood dripping down the side of her face and into her hair, tilting her head to one side so she wouldn’t drip all over the floor.

“Well?”

“Well.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, you know. An accident.”

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

“It’s been a bad couple of weeks, doctor. A bad couple of weeks.”

The doctor assessed her injury quickly, with light, deft hands that knew their way around broken flesh and bones. “You definitely need stitches.”

She nodded, quietly. “I figured.”

He moved around the room, going from cupboard to drawer to cupboard, pulling out needles and gauze and all manner of tools he would need to start the process of putting her back together. In contrast to the lightness of his hands, his movement was clunky, slow, and heavy. In this tiny closet of a room, his limp had nowhere to hide.

As she waited, a deep sigh escaped her lips, and this was enough to confirm the doctor’s instinct: the operating table was a welcome reprieve for her; a pause and rare moment of silence in the storm and mayhem that were currently her life.

He licked his lips imperceptibly as he prepared to stitch her up; he was hungry to know more about the chaos, the internal injury that was bleeding right through her overcast eyes and not-quite-there presence.

But he was also wise enough to know he had to approach extracting the details with surgical skill.

If he did this right, she would simply lay it all at his feet like a prize. His tools were set out on the table, ready to mend her body. His mind, however, was set on extracting her pain, satiating himself with her story, and stealing a few moments of the real, raw shit that seemed to be bursting at the seams of life all around him but that he had never been allowed to partake in. Pain and blood and tears passed through his doors all day every day but it was the broken souls he craved, the stories, the rawness, the reality of life that he seemed so unable to experience for himself in his isolated, solitary existence. So he stole it from others. He closed his eyes and tasted their pain on his tongue, and it gave him purpose, it kept him going, it kept him alive.

He knew this would take patience, skill, and the same kind of lightness he possessed in his expert hands. Oh but he was ready, so ready; for this was his game, his hunt, his raison d’être.

He stopped moving around the room for a moment, and looked towards the operating table where she was sitting. He noticed she was beginning to drift away and get lost in her thoughts, which was his queue to start the process. First, the breathing. To make sure he didn’t interrupt her too soon. Three deep breaths, with a pause at the top, just like that one yoga instructor who came in with a dislocated shoulder and a broken heart taught him.

<<To be continued…>>