Tag: Fiction
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A form of pain
Ifediba NzubePort Harcourt, Nigeria For Yewande, pain is Èsù slapping her head like a bata drum. But no one sees that; they see only a tumor pushing out her left eye, up her palate, and through her nostrils. Most days she smells like meat gone green. The other patients can tolerate the smell but they…
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Three doctor’s visits
Zara AzizBristol, England Only one week ago Yasmin had been at the same flats to see her patient, Jenny Johnson. Jenny was a lovely lady of around fifty-two, with a lilting Irish accent and a penchant for saving stray dogs. But she sometimes missed medication and when she relapsed all hell broke loose. Rumour had…
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Chemo room
Sarah SmithPike Road, Alabama, United States Cancer makes me glad I am fat. Mr. Weiss, two chairs down from Jack and me today, does not agree. Two months ago, Mr. Weiss tried to convince me of the importance of keeping in shape and maintaining a healthy weight. As though I did not know these things. He assumes…
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Jacarandas – a dream
In the year when the Olympic Games were held in Australia, the Jacarandas were in full bloom and their blue blossoms wafted through the air. At the Olympic campus an English boy and an Australian girl fell in love. Every night they would be seen walking through the cool air holding hands. Sometimes they went…
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Butterfly day
Marsal SanchesBismarck, North Dakota, United States He did not believe that a black butterfly was an omen of death. It was just some old superstition he remembered hearing from his Brazilian babysitter many years before, sort of a South American banshee. Someone would see a black butterfly inside the house and, a few hours later,…
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Percy’s last day
Shampa SinhaTasmania, Australia Percy missed his regular train that morning, the one that would have given him a comfortable half-hour cushion between his arrival at the station and “knife-to-skin” time at the operating theatre. He felt his anxiety levels rising within him like bile as the train neared the hospital. He was generally of a…
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Heroes need medical care too
Liam FarrellRostrevor, Ireland I was driving along a quiet country road when I saw the first bluebell, its delicate beauty a promise of spring. I stopped to relish the moment, to live in the now. Birdsong, the wind rustling through hedgerows, and the disheveled dryad loveliness left me humbled. In the distance a cuckoo sang,…
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Looking glass land
Christy D. Di FrancesBoston, Massachusetts, USA I It begins the way stories often end: that excruciatingly one-sided conversation with some loved one or another. His grandmother. Finally something seems to awaken her from the obscurity of her world. “Do ye ken where he’s gone?”i She frames the question in a conspiratorial whisper, her eyes such…
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The resident
Sarah de ForestChicago, Illinois, USA He is a handsome man, no one can deny it, and he has a pleasant smile. In this terrible place, its inhabitants ravaged by hunger and disease, he always looks as though he just came from the barber, and his men know that slovenliness or disorder is the surest way…