Four Minutes

I turn my phone over in my hands, finding something soothing in the way its weight shifts around and around. I turn it on once, glance down at the screen, and look back up again. A second passes, and I realize I had turned it on to look at the time, but my eyes had skimmed right past the display. I do it again, consciously this time, and note: 11:07. Eleven-oh-seven. Eleven-oh-seven. I spin the phone around some more, let the plastic corners hit against my left thigh, and when the shiny black screen is facing me I flick the power button to bring it back to life again. Eleven-oh-eight. Eleven-oh-eight.

I had stopped shaking at some point, the jitters swapped out with this bone-deep numbness that makes me feel like my skin has been replaced by an all-over woolly blanket. My throat hurts. I had been shouting, screaming, but I can’t remember the details. I can see her face, slack and pale, but what I was thinking…

I flip my phone around. Power button. Eleven-oh-nine.

No one else is with me. My only companions are a potted rubber fig tree in the corner and seven other plastic chairs and the masking scent of lemon floor cleaner. There’s something suspicious about that scent in hospitals, something that brings to mind the unpleasantness it’s covering up. Lemon floor cleaner in a school or an office building or a shopping mall is just clean floors. Lemon floor cleaner in a hospital is hiding something.

Flip. Power button. Eleven-ten.

The floors are nice, though. Shiny tiles that reflect back the fluorescent lights from above. It’s good that they’re tiles. Easier to spread out that lemon floor cleaner and wipe away all that unpleasantness. Carpeting would really be a bitch to clean in a place like this.

Flip. Power button. Eleven-eleven. Make a wish.

I wish…

The door opens. I hadn’t heard any footsteps in the hall, but here’s the doctor: tall, professional. Grim. I have stopped flipping my phone around and around, instead clutching it tightly in my hand as the doctor’s words wash over me. Maybe I press the power button, too, but I don’t look at the screen. I don’t know what time it is. I only see her face.

My woolly-blanket skin has gone all hot and cold with agony and the doctor is saying something apologetic but I have stopped listening. Nausea is crawling up from my stomach and I’ve started shaking again.

It’s very good that the floors are tiles.