"Sweetheart, wake up… Time to take your medicine." A thrumming pounded in my head, beating my eardrums in and out to the rhythm of my heartbeat. It was morning at the small psychiatric hospital where I worked, my least favorite time of day; It meant that I would have to wake grouchy patients and administer their bitter-tasting medicines that kept them dangling precariously on the edge of sanity and their own twisted dementia.
"Mmm…?" The old, shattered woman that lay on the bed beside me stirred, a soft utterance emitting from her chapped lips. Wrinkled skin draped loosely from her would-be beautiful face, and the limp, grey waves of hair, no longer even hinting at their once luminous golden sheer, draped unceremoniously on her pillow. Blue eyes blinked open; I could feel their cold stare pierce through me, ageless in their infinite innocence.
"Good morning, Miss Alice." I tried to be chipper, even though one of my small, delicate hands, skin the color of milk chocolate, was wringing at the fabric of my pale pink nurse's uniform. I held out a pill to the old woman in the palm of my hand. As she reached out to take it, the colors of our skin clashed entrancingly: My warm, beautiful brown and her deathly white. I left a cup of orange juice on her bedside table and drew open the bland white curtains, exposing sunlight and a city scene outside the window on the wall opposite her bed.
After making sure Alice took her pill, I stepped outside, leaving the door partially open, as is the practice at the institute. It grants patients their privacy, but allows we nurses to easily monitor them. I glanced at the clipboard in my arms to see who my next patient was… A Stanley White. I groaned inwardly, and prepared his medicine, and myself, before knocking softly on his door and stepping into the room.
"Nurse." He greeted me gruffly. Stanley, a rich, middle-aged man with tan skin and jet black hair, was admitted to the hospital after several counts of attempted suicide. I dreaded seeing him each morning, sitting in the uncomfortable wooden chair provided in each room, staring out his window at a graffitied brick wall across the street. I had always found it disturbing that my employers had placed a depressed, often hopeless man in a room with so dreary a view.
"Hello, Stanley," I responded, a little more awkwardly than I would have liked, though I doubt the man noticed. "Here you are…" He took the medicine from me, downing it as always without even a sip of water. "How are you feeling today?"
My friendly chit-chat received nothing but a shrug of his broad shoulders and a grunt, so I smiled weakly at him and took my leave. I sighed as I headed back to the nurse's station, shaking my head dejectedly. It is a depressing line of work, I'm in, but somebody has to do it.
"Dinah!" I heard a shaky, slurred voice call from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder at the sound of my name, eyes falling upon Alice, standing outside her doorway, clutching her hair. "Where have you gone?" She walked slowly over to the spot where I stood, petrified. Her gate was that one would expect of an old, tired woman, but surprisingly determined.
I reached out and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Honey, please, just tell us who's Dinah?" This was a common, yet always startling occurrence at the hospital, patients calling out for lost friends or family members. Yet I couldn't remember ever reading about a Dinah in Alice's list of family members, which I had all but memorized. I had taken a special interest in Alice for some reason: Perhaps it was the way she never complained about her medicines, the way most of the other patients did. Or violently thrash about at night, scaring the young interns on duty. Or maybe it was simply that look in her eyes, as if always clutching at her lost youth. Whatever it was, I was drawn to the feeble old lady.
"Dinah? Dinah!" Alice called desperately, not acknowledging my presence, my touch, or my query. I took Alice's hand and tried to gently guide her back to her room. "Come here, come here.. It'll be okay. We'll look for Dinah, I promise." Alice went obediently with me, but her eyes were glazed over, as if seeing some other dimension invisible to me. When we reached the woman's room, I sat her down on the bed before exiting, closing the door and locking it from the outside so Alice was trapped inside.