Temporary

 

“Even the pain doesn’t force me to save myself.”

 

An ashen visage, partial and disfigured, wavered in and out of the deep delusion of beauty. Looking drearily down, she entranced herself in her own reflection. A dull purple light pressed itself on her trey, lingering long enough only to distort her vision further.

 

“The agenda is so constricted – I’m consumed by it…I’ll get old following it.”

 

She walked further, her steps echoing across a noiseless hallway. The luminescence of light receded from the motion beneath it, and the face observing the trey grew opaque and revolting with utmost clarity in the darkness.

 

Hard linoleum pressed against her heels, and with every step she took, a slow, intimate burning spread across her heels and legs. She envisioned a cut away of a tree with deep roots, fearing the blisters on her heels would lead to sepsis, but the thoughts evanesced when blood cooled the fire of the wounds.

 

Her trey rattled, and the syringes, laid perfectly side by side in the manner  of an obsessive compulsive, cried a little from the sharp tips of their needles.

 

“I’m sure of that. But of everything else – I don’t really know.”

 

She kept her lips parted, letting air stream between them, taking each step with caution. Looking at her feet, she pictured clouds beneath her - clouds washed in a color of off-white and sunset orange. She paced across the weightless clouds, letting herself sink into the perforated softness. It alleviated the pain until the banality of life rose in a crescendo, and then she found herself landing on the cold linoleum floors, shivering, disappointed, and in pain.

 

The two hemispheres of her vision merged to create an apparition in the near distance. It trembled under a coat of sable light, unusually quiet but rapid in movement. Had it been a hallucination the Nurse would have dismissed it – but unlike the mirage of an illusion, it appeared lucid and human in motion and consistency. 

 

The shivering stillness gave way to a soft movement, a movement that glided along the imagined clouds beneath it. The Nurse drew herself closer to meet the object, though part of her doubted she was going to find anything except thin and pure air. The object sided itself with a protruding corner on the edge of the hallway. The light was fading in and out, blinking with a sort of mechanical tachycardia, but simultaneously operating slow and arrhythmic. It danced between speeds, highlighting the silhouette behind the rolling curtain.

 

A beautiful, muscular body hid behind the curtain, staring up at the light, cradling itself and shivering. The figure’s breasts were accented beyond realism – and the figure seemed to be dancing amongst the flashes of purple light, her hands gliding across her chest as if she were made of ice. The nurse stood still and watched the slow moving picture film – her eyes straining from the extremes of the light. For a singular moment, she felt the graze of flora across her fingertips – and the sensation of peace created whorls of warmth on her inner thighs.

 

Without warning, a shroud of weight hampered her senses, and she saw nothing beneath the light. The curtain moaned as it wheeled past her, and a thin strip of white light licked in an uneven line, whispering amongst The Nurse and the curtain – she looked again, past the beige sheet, and gasped at a malformed human being – mostly comprised of a glutton’s spoils and the cysts and blisters spotting squalid skin. The unvarnished woman and her curtain flittered away into the distant darkness – the darkness from which The Nurse originated.

 

“Shears.”

 

The Nurse uttered the word, letting her stomach churn. The nurse gripped her metal trey and stared into her reflection, halfway smiling at the reflection that she defiled. Her pallid skin disappeared where her nape began, almost forbidding the sexual appetite of that area between collar bone and cleavage; the epitome of her physical enticement lay resting in shadow. She let her finger slip into the crevasse, and an overwhelming scent of the flesh released itself in a curling transparent wisp of smoke. Her heart sunk – and she realized she was in fact real.

 

The Nurse looked up and felt a voice curl into her inner ear. It sang, somber and with definitive melancholy. The sounds of electronic locks sang highly, and the light in the hallway ceased to move at all, the long slender bulb becoming darker as the sounds trailed off. Her eyes were dilated – and the darkness felt so bright – as if the moon were reflecting upon blind eyes.