Colleen Knight

It's Mine.

I was an ER nurse until I turned forty and decided I needed a changed. It had been years eating at me; eating at my motivation, slowing my response to patients laying on the hospital beds, some of them bleeding out. They deserved a quicker response and the monotonies of the job exasperated by the years under my belt grabbing scalpels and sponges, dropped bullets and pieces of glass and random other foreign objects people get stuck in them, wouldn’t allow me to move any faster than a baby tortious being devoured by its rival kin. Every time I needed to move, I envisioned my younger sister pulling at my leg; being the rival tortoise. She’d be all sprawled out on the floor with her hands wrapped around my ankles. Sometimes if I didn’t slow enough, she would sink her little teeth into the thin white skin of my ankle.