Short fiction

A. L. S.

I'm nineteen. My hands touch his skin, soft but tight. I don't know his age. We are close enough that I can see the hairs on his chest. He doesn't look at me, his eyes closed against everything. I push down, again and again, his body jerks in time with the rhythmic pulsations of mine. If he were breathing, I would feel it on my arm. I keep going, looking at his frail body and the damage being done. The cannulas creep into his paper thin skin, routing artificial life into his body as the person who inhabited it moves further and further away.

I hope.

Air is pushed into his reluctant lungs, passing into the blood I pump around his still veins. Five people moving silently overfill this room designed for one. Equipment scattered like an afterthought, clutters the rough carpet grating my knees through the coarse green trousers.

A thin crack fills my heart with dread. A mental apology is made as my tired arms continue. My brain considers the recipient of this hasty apology. The body I have broken? The person I would have hurt? Or the wife a few doors down, who would have heard our arrival, late in the night, felt our proximity and known the worst.

She would not have heard the quiet cracking of her husband's ribs beneath my careful hands, but she would have heard his silence.

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