Wires

Gillian Albright, the lone nurse for Room D of the Slocomb Ward wiped Edward’s cannula before the first syringe went in.

“I’m just purging the line before giving you this dosage.”

Cool, transparent fluid plunged its way down the syringe and through the small, forked plastic tube in Edward’s arm. The nurse watched as it made its way through the needle attached to her patient’s bony forearm and out of sight.

She removed the first syringe and wiped the cannula once again. “There we go.”

On her small tray, another syringe was already prepared, its contents a curious milky mix.

The identity of the cocktail was unknown to the patient. It was questionable if it even worked. Not that he could say much on the matter.

His jaws were wired shut.

The true pain of Edward Matheson was that he was trapped from the world he lived in. Trapped inside his head. He could not vocalise his rapidly cascading thoughts let alone say his own name, and for a man who had lived a third of a century with those privileges up until the last however-long-it’s-been, well, it was cruel.

And Nurse Albright only wanted to be kind.

“Don’t worry, Eddy, I’m here for you,” the sweet nurse said. She removed the second syringe and cleaned up, before a reassuring pat to Edward’s leg marked her departure from the room once again.

A nurse is not a servant, nor a parent to a new-born. There was no need for Gillian to be in the room 24/7. She could be summoned whenever, like a servant, and she had instincts on par with a new parent, but she was neither. Nurses were neither.

But nurses were necessary. They cared more and did more than doctors do, but you can’t have doctors hearing that. People hearing that. When people leave hospital, they never really reflect on the nursing staff. They just focus on their doctor. Like there was a massive difference. Like doctors were the sun and nurses were the shadows caused by the patients the sun shines upon. Doctors were men in suits and tut tut tuts while nurses were effeminate and secondary and the world had not changed to reflect that those ideas were ideas, and not the truth.

Doctors can be women, nurses can be men. But will a patient ever not turn their nose up at a nurse when they could have a doctor?

To Edward, he had someone. And that was all that mattered. His bed was a cage with its remote-controlled orientation and guardrails pulled up on all sides, like an over-sized baby in an over-sized cradle. It didn’t matter what status Nurse Albright had about her, just the fact that she brought the food and the attention and the drugs. Oh the drugs.

Morphine is never a good idea. Except if one is in pain, or one is addicted to morphine. And even then, it is not a good idea. Edward was hooked on the stuff one way or another; it was the way that was observed to be effective. It soothed him.

Symbiosis. That was what Nurse Gillian Albright of Beaconfield and Patient Edward Matheson of Newtonport had. To function, both existed. Give and take. The nurse and her patient. The nurse and the once brilliant man.

Or so Gillian had attempted to ascertain. Nurses don’t get a file with a full background on the patient. Age, sure. Gender, sure. Body mass index, smoker yes or no, address, hospital, bed, number…But Gillian was given nothing that made Edward human.

Preferred name, that was something. “Eddy.”

She guessed that was what he preferred. Edward Matheson couldn’t say anything and didn’t react to anything, really. The whole ordeal put the stress on him. Gillian kept her observation ever going, desperate in the search for details. It was never this hard.

The nurse found a sort of cruelty in the cards that were dealt to Edward. A jaw wired shut in an artificial smile, sullen eyes in a sunken face of malnutrition and frustration. The man that sat in that bed had no way of speaking, and in Gillian’s eyes that was what made Edward who he was. Speech.

A politician, maybe? A self-help guru? Every day she’d guess aloud and receive no response either way. The days were strung into weeks and still she received no confirmation.

He couldn’t have been an artist. Gillian always left her pen pockets slightly unattended so desperate patients could have a swipe and a doodle. Not a musician, a musician would be tapping on things, the bedside table, the railings, straws. The imagined presence of their instruments.

Whatever it was, Edward Matheson had to be someone who lived by their voice.

“A singer!” Gillian said as she stepped back into the room, a jug of water in hand. “Is that it, Eddy? Were you a singer?”

She sat on the edge of the patient’s bed and poured a plastic cup of H2O. Nurse Albright rested the jug on the wheeled, wooden table and produced a straw between her fingers, to which she tugged either side with a small crack, bending one end to form the manoeuvrable drinking end.

The water bubbled as the plastic dipped inside the cup, and the nurse navigated the tip of the straw towards Edward’s mouth. She held the cup in her other hand, and looked over the silent patient.

“I’d like to think you were a singer,” the nurse smiled. Her face dulled a slight shade as she looked upon the heavy eyelids and the vacant gaze. Whoever he was, Edward Matheson had taken a break from being Edward Matheson. “Yeah. Filling concert halls or even just karaoke bars, Eddy Matheson. What a singer.”

She gave up on trying to get Edward to drink up, and rested the cup of water alongside the other untouched drinks on the bedside table. They had accumulated, and that made Nurse Albright frown.

An unhappy patient was one thing, but a dehydrated one was worse.

All she had been able to give Edward was the medicine. The medicine, the morphine, and the purge. She hoped she had gotten rid of Edward’s pain, but she lamented how she couldn’t help much more.

That was contrary to everything she stood for and everything she wished. She didn’t want to do harm, and she just wanted Edward Matheson to talk again. Even sing again. Instead, she was treated to the sight of a shell of a man, with a mouth that looked like a desert war. Bloody, lesioned, dry, cracked, ripped, broken, torn. A nurse had to fix things, but she couldn’t fix Edward.

He was the best-case scenario in that ward. Gillian had other patients, but Nurse Albright, at the end of all things, had the best chance with Edward. She was not a bad nurse, not in the slightest; it was just the way things were. Slocomb Ward could have been second only to the Critical Care Ward when you looked at the numbers. The bad numbers with death being more a fixture than life.

Edward hadn’t come in like that, though. It wasn’t cancer or an organ surgery or one of them diseases that the media would turn into a buzzword for travel restrictions and mass hysteria. It was his jaw. A double jaw surgery that ultimately left Gillian’s patient unable to talk with more metal than bone in his mouth. A double jaw surgery that turned a patient into a prisoner of his own mind, a mental trapping of torture.

Physically, Edward was still the best of Gillian’s patients, psychologically, he was probably one of the worst. It does not do well on the mind to be forced to revert back into a devolved state.

For a surgery that strips years away from a patient, Edward’s experience was not one many would rush into. The circumstances were still hazy to Gillian, but whatever it was, it was done now. Edward Matheson was no longer the man he once was. For better or for worse. Stripped of agency, stripped of the clothes he came in with, stripped of all forms of communication with the world. Edward turned up to the hospital with the shirt on his back and a bag with a towel and toiletries. That was it.

Next of kin was his father, and with the details on file, maybe Edward needed to update things. If it wasn’t just because of Jensen Road being evacuated two years ago, it would be the storm and flooding of what happened three back that purged that corner of geography.

Gillian could see where the road once was from the window. A cramped city meant for a tall, narrow hospital. A skyscraper of sorts full of the living, the sick, the dying, and the dead. From the bottom to the top, in that order. Edward wasn’t too far up to be in the latter two categories, but it was high enough to get a wide view of the metropolis that descended and sprawled outside.

The city wasn’t what it once was. When Gillian was a kid she could play hopscotch in the park and scare boys by kissing them. Nowadays she could only exercise the latter. The city was made of concrete and broken homes, and Gillian was one of those who wanted to fix things.

But she really couldn’t fix anything.

She stared out at the dark abyss that was midnight in the city streets, a cup of tea steaming her face and burning her palm. She wasn’t a bad nurse, she wasn’t a bad person, she just didn’t have the luck.

Everything she touched she turned to ash. Marriage, family, house, dreams.

She dreamed she could be a doctor, respected. Wear a suit and tut tut tut and stand alongside the men that demean her gender and the stance of just-as-noble professions such as nursing.

Gillian dreamed of being able to play the piano and sing, like the independent, dark haired, gravelly musicians of her college years. Filling bars and coffee houses with her tones she wasted on the sick that wouldn’t listen, or wouldn’t appreciate.

Gillian Albright dreamed of being an artist who could paint a mural to the city she grew up in, sketch out a masterpiece to hang on the walls of galleries.

Nurse Gillian Albright just wanted to be someone with a voice that people would listen to, and one that would be appreciated, and one that people would be soothed by, and be healed by, and How. Is. That. So. Fucking. Hard.

Instead, there she was, trapped in her own head. Unable to voice anything. Her lips closed because nothing good ever came from her opening them. Her jaw wired shut in an artificial smile, doomed forever to work with patients who never appreciated her. Listened to her. Helped her.

She was there for her patients, but they were never there for her. Nancy Gosford: Coma. Slept peacefully without a murmur into death. Oliver Harris: Vegetable. Not a brain cell behind those drooling lips. Stephen Harrleson: Cancer. Full of pain without love. Ivan Albright: Car crash victim. Lacey Albright: Car crash victim. Donny Albright: Car crash victim. Edward Matheson…

Edward Matheson.

“Eddy?”

Nurse Albright paced back into the room where her silent patient remained. Her mug of tea leaked over onto her fingers and scaled her skin, but she didn’t bat an eyelash. She just wanted to get back to Edward and look after him. Look. After. Him.

The nurse patted her hip pockets. Her breast pocket. She found what she was looking for.

“Eddy? Edward?”

Nurse Albright hurried herself by Edward’s side. She had had enough. Nothing was working. Nothing was helping. It was just time to end this.

With a flourish of her fingers, the scissors in her hands gnashed. The light from the bulbs overhead bounced light over Nurse Albright’s eyes and over Edward’s eyes, and in both violence and death could be seen.

In a second, hesitation hit Gillian. What was she doing? She couldn’t possibly consider what her mind made her consider. The nurse looked to her tools and saw the bad that could be done with them, but fate threw her the chance to do some good.

The blood that had trickled down Edward Matheson’s throat since his operation, blood that could not be spat out, blood that was trapped into the depths of the patient’s digestion, had disturbed. The cocktails that Gillian had administered had not done their job effectively. That blood had turned over, had curdled, had concocted a mixture of putrid brown-and-black flaked stew, and all it wanted to do was escape.

So, it rushed its way up Edward’s gullet.

It burned and it tore away Edward’s insides. It peeled like a careless infant would on fresh wallpaper. The fluids clawed their way to the back of Edward’s throat, and had no sign of stopping.

The nurse observed what was going on, and only offered: “Eddy?!”

With another gnash of the scissors in her hand, Gillian hopped to Edward’s aid. Without it, Edward would no-doubt choke on his own vomit, trapped inside like everything else that had been wired away from the world.

Gillian tried her best to hold Edward down. He resisted, but he still abstained from making a sound. Gillian tilted his head to the side to try and help the path of the vomit, but it wasn’t enough. She held the disinfected scissors in the air for a moment, flourishing the task that was about to save a life, and then she began her work on the wires.

It was not easy, not easy at all. The wires the surgeons who were long-gone had used were not unbreakable, but they sure did enough to hold one back. It was necessary for the job to take. It was one thing to have to have jaw surgery, it was another to have to go through it all again because of a relapse.

With each gnash of the blades, Gillian tried hard to free her patient. This was her time to do good and to be appreciated. This was her time. It was her moment. Hers. All hers.

She squeezed and brewed up annoyance each time the scissors slipped from their place. Every plink! made for another piece of fraying wire. The thought of putting all these wires in place seemed like a dream compared to the nightmare of getting them off in time.

The regurgitation Edward was going through had no signs of stopping. Gillian noted the black going into white going into red going into black of the layers of vomit and viscous fluid expelling itself from the back of Edward’s throat.

“Oh, Eddy! Oh Eddy, I’m sorry! I’m almost finished!”

Blood dripped and trickled and spurt with each time the scissors missed their designated path and instead cut into lip. Gum. Cheek. There was no need for accuracy, Gillian was not a surgeon, she was not the doctor she wanted to be. In this moment she was a nurse, and she would be the best damn nurse out there.

Gillian thrashed as Edward continued his resistance, but she threw all of her weight onto him. Just a few more wires. Just a few more.

Edward’s jaw began to open and shut from one end, more and more being freed like an opening zip the more and more Gillian cut. Wires frayed and snapped and Edward’s mouth would fly open a little more. The vomit continued to trickle out the open side of his mouth, rolling over his bloodied lips and down his drooling chin.

Bile oozed into the fresh wounds, the lesions on his lips torn wider and wider apart from the traumas going on. Milky excretions that looked on par with the dead continued to spout and project and fill the bedspace, and they forever stained Gillian’s uniform and her skin.

Gillian’s arms were torn to shreds by the clawing of Edward’s unkempt fingernails. Her blood and Edward’s were one in the same, forever flowing into one another’s through the struggle for freedom. This was Gillian’s shining hour, and it was also the lowest. Her patient, a mess of medication and regurgitation, a jaw unfixed, struggling and resisting, all because of Gillian. All. Because. Of Gillian.

But she saved him. She saved herself. She almost did something horrible. Something horrible like she hadn’t done for a long time. The car crash that took her no-good-for-nothing family.

The city wasn’t what it once was. By now, the city had lost all of its doctors. Its singers. Its politicians. Its self-help gurus. Its artists. Its musicians.

Dead filled the streets, the living fled the streets, and the insane remained. Those who could not be helped. Those who could not be saved. Those who thought they were put on the Earth as a higher power. A power to help, heal.

People like Nurse Gillian Albright of Beaconfield. A disillusioned, psychotic nurse who had long-since been stripped of her right to practise because of the way she treated patients and the malpractice therein. A woman with a self-imposed curse to walk the halls of Slocomb Ward in the city hospital, maintaining the lives of those long dead. Unrestrained by the burden of a family she “rightfully” murdered so she could “save” them.

From this.

Hell on Earth.

The incurable disease that brewed and bred despite the travel restrictions, the mass hysteria, the warnings, the treatments.

For Nurse Gillian Albright, it was a blessing to embrace the once former Edward Matheson of Newtonport, whose sunken eyeballs had rolled back into his skull, ivory bloodshot death married with a vile, rancid, cannibalistic bite.

Such a bite to tear right through the stressed, surrendered nurse’s neck. Skin, muscle, blood, and bone, all ripped in one swish of Edward’s jaw. The wires dug in alongside the razor teeth, some left themselves embedded into Gillian’s flesh as Edward relinquished. Prickled and wavy and bloody, an incurable stubble.

Gillian and Edward’s blood became one once again, as her expansive wound slingshot blood into the open, butchered maw of the deceased human underneath her, forever gnashing with carnivorous tendency.

The nurse didn’t scream once. Someone finally helped her. Saved her. By the looks of it, Edward’s operation was a success.

Now he could sing again.