NIGHT SHIFT

Shadows Patrol the Floor as the Night Nurse makes her eternal rounds

Night is falling; the sun descends, and the Spirits rise…

welcome to the Night Shift.

Hospitals by Day are Chrome and Glass glinting in the sun, clean hallways and busy lobbies… gardens provide comfort and cheer to those looking out the windows, the pleasantness of stone, grass and water. The promise of Babies is everpresent, the bearers of happy balloons and flowers bringing tribute to the JoyBringers. The clatter of Humanity sings Life in the Day Hospital, even the harshest reality…

By Day, the sheen of light runs along linoleum floors; but by Night, the saturation of shadow recedes into darkened hallways without end.

Hospitals by Night are a different entity; a pervasive loneliness descends as the doors close. The lights are dimmed, the curtains drawn, and the Visitor sits by the bed, listening to machines hiss in time to breaths.

For those who stray, the Hospital mazes arise, endless twisting halls echoing the heaviness of concrete floors in basements and clicking heels down empty flights of stairs -

the clatter of the soda bottle in the vending machine accompanies the buzzing of the lone light bulb flickering intermittently overhead, and the seeker hurries away, back to the bedside, back to the duty…

She is already there.

Do not look directly at her.

She is busy, and She is not expecting us; in her time, there was none allowed on the floor, none except the Hospital staff. The flash of white hose, the whisper of starched cotton coalesces in the silent gloom as a shadow shifts across the sheet,

a hand?

drifting across the bed

the chill of alcohol and hydrogen pyroxide, the scent of surgical steel and cotton balls wafting past to rustle the curtains past…

Down the hall, the scrunch of crepe soles creeps away, fading into the empty room, the ripple of past and present shimmering into darkness.

Somewhere, on the other side of time, the Patient in the Empty Room awaits the Night Nurse. She tends the One who never left; her cool hands soothe the fevered brow of dead memory past…

I watch her pass, making her Eternal Rounds on the Night Shift.