Black-Eyed Dog

Her bum stung, on her top right cheek where this gentle black nurse had stuck her. That wasn’t the worst part, though, the worst was when she pushed the stuff in and she could feel her muscles burning, like it was dissolving her flesh from the inside out. The black nurse told her to wait a half hour, massage her bum a little bit before she could go as she closed the door with the frosty glass pane behind her.

The university health center was the strangest place. She had to put her own pee sample in the improvised lab with a mini refrigerator, and the waiting room was color themed with couches that had huge cushions and no arm rests. At first the black nurse brought her back past the reception and the nurses’ station and around a hallway and another. There were offices in between check-up rooms, and these three rooms in a row. Observation 1. Observation 2. Observation 3. She couldn’t really figure out why any would need observing really, not here in the student health services for little colds and jammed fingers and things until the black nurse brought her into Observation 1 and told her to pull her pants down halfway across her bum, “right here” she even brought her palm up as an example.

The girl’s hands were cold. When she rubbed her fingertips together, she could feel this slight bit of nervous deep in them she got sometimes. She pressed them hard against her cheeks after pulling up the hard blanket from her feet. Thirty minutes with the stinging bum and cold hands. Her forehead sunk into the pillow. It smelled sterilized, that clean sterilized hospital smell with undertones of piss. It caught her off guard, this smell, her fingers so, so cold against her cheeks but her face flushed, her eyelids fell tight against her aching eyes.

She thought about Elgin, the psych ward of Elgin and that smell all over the place, in the day room and the shower room and the hallway, her patient room and the room with the toilet and the sink. There weren’t any mirrors in the room with the toilet and the sink.

She hadn’t remembered that place in ages or the heavy feeling that came with it, the one that pressed her whole body down and dragged her feet when she tried to step, pulled her arms down when she tried to move. The observation room, where’d they put someone who wouldn’t eat or had cut with the broken edge of a plastic spork, it was always so clean in there, so sterilized.

Her first night in Elgin after dinner she asked the nurse if she could sleep for a while, so she got special permission to go to her patient room. She laid on her bed in the dark feeling heavy and sad. She let herself cry hard for awhile in the dark. It was a strange day, so many people had seen the red and white lines drawn across her forearm, and no one had seen them before. She could barely move in the dark.

The second night in Elgin she sat on the window ledge, pressing her body hard against the cool thick pane. She squeezed the city lights between her fingers, trying to burn them out, and counted the mirrored lights in the sky. She couldn’t move until she had pressed sharp against the edge of her wrist, drew up perfect beads of blood in a row. She was still and quiet later when they stripped her, traded her clothes for a hospital gown while telling her she was sick. They left her socks, but she could barely pull them up across her feet.

There was something perverse about it all, that whole place. It was always cold, sterilized and cold air even when she tried to drown herself under the shower. Something was heightened, a weird sickness conscious through her, making her fingers always nervous and clammy. That smell permeating everything, the sick, cold smell that quaked her bones and left no room, there was no room for healing left at all. And whenever she smelled it later, it filled up all the space in her again and she she’d get heavy, she couldn’t move.

That was a long time ago, and now her bum stung and she was just in Observation 1 at the student health services. She was okay now. Yeah, she said it out loud, testing it out. Yeah, I’m okay now.