They called it The Silver Wing. Fluorescent hum and antiseptic time. Beds with wheels, wheels with names, names with no faces. The orderlies moved like ghosts but left stains behind. And Room 14C always smelled of licorice and rust, though no one ever brought candy and the pipes were all bone-dry.
He sat there every day, the Ancient — leathered hands, liver-spotted scalp. He said nothing unless spoken to, and even then it was often in numbers and bird names. “Eleven kestrels on the fence, boy. That’s when the sky breaks.”
She arrived on a Tuesday, or it may have been a dream I was having. A girl, or the idea of one. Blonde hair in static disarray. Hospital scrubs a few sizes too big, or too small — they shifted. Her name tag changed hourly: Eve, Echo, Eventide. She smiled like someone who had read all the books and forgotten them on purpose.
They said she was an intern. They said she was in training. They said she didn’t exist.
She spent time with the Ancient. Hours, maybe weeks. I saw her reading his chart upside down, laughing at something no one heard. Sometimes she’d close the curtain. The light would flicker. And when it opened again, he was humming some war tune I couldn’t place and she smelled like static and cloves.
I asked her once what she was doing. She looked at me — through me — and said,
“Memory’s just another kind of body, sweetheart. If you touch it right, it moans.”
After that, I started forgetting my own name.
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