It’s like the riddle. Three doors; two lead to certain death.
Door One: A mother, breath rasping, crying for her children.
Door Two: A feverish teenager, too exhausted to beg for help.
Door Three: A pensioner, grey-haired but agile, coughing continuously.
Hands shaking, you tighten your mask, open a door.
Jo Withers writes short fiction from her home in South Australia. Recent work appears in NFFD Anthology (U.K.), Best Microfictions 2020, Reflex Fiction and Spelk.
“I’ll take my lunch later,” I told my head nurse.
I held Betty’s hand while her breathing slowed to almost nothing. Her family hadn’t visited in weeks.
“It’s okay. You can go now. He’s waiting for you.”
I smoothed her hair, and she relaxed as she took her last breath.
Catherine McAllister loves her work as an emergency room nurse and also enjoys teaching nursing students. She has two lovely daughters, three lively dogs, and a supportive husband. She writes in her free time.
Her name was Marion: patience of Ms. Nightingale; sternness of a schoolteacher; the humanity of a friend. She delivered our baby at 4:55 AM.
Shift over, she slipped on her leather trousers and jacket, a pair of biker boots, and a bright red helmet. So incongruous: perhaps her own midwife crisis?
Lisa is an English teacher who enjoys writing, sewing and designing jewellery, sometimes all at once!
Young Princess Emeldatine sat in her tower, surveying the kingdom she would one day inherit. “When I’m Queen, I’ll make every day my birthday!” she declared.
Nurse chuckled. “You’d get old pretty quickly!”
“I’ll also have a pet dragon,” said Emeldatine. “Like the moldy one at the window!”
Nurse fainted.