The Mechanic and the Caregiver

A Story by Skoyle

An assignment for my Creative Writing class; I found out that I write too 'intelligently' with my characters.

At a corner coffee shop, two men sat, drank their beverages black, and talked about life as they always did. You could call them friends, but they knew next to nothing about each other having only spent their time drinking coffee and talking about news. They had both just sat down, tired from their days' work. One, a mechanic, was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, both covered in grease stains. The other, a hospice caregiver, still wore his scrubs from the clinic.
"We've been friends for years and I've always wanted to ask you," the mechanic said as he set down his coffee, breaking the silence.
"Ask me what?"
"What's it like to fix humans?" asked the mechanic.
"I work at a hospice," the caregiver replied.
"You know I know where you work, that's why I asked."
"If you know that I work at a hospice, then you should know that I don't 'fix' people," said the caregiver. "I wouldn't know what it's like to fix a person."
"Then what do you do?" the mechanic asked.
"I guess what I do is ease the pain of the dying," the caregiver answered. "I try to make the end as painless as possible and try to fix any problems that may occur."
"So you do fix."
"You know what I meant."
"I don't think I do." The mechanic sipped his coffee and produced a wrench from his belt. "You see this? Someone tells me that they've got a something or another that's broken and I go out and I fix it. People bring me a hunk of metal, I take it apart with my wrench and I put it back together with my wrench, I give it back to them a machine, good as new." He slid his wrench back into his belt.
"Wonderful," said the caregiver, "but that's nothing like what I do."
"Why?"
"Because what I work on are human," the caregiver answered. "We get patients who are almost dead, they're going to die, and all they ask is that we stop the pain. They can't be fixed."
"Why can't they be fixed? Are we not but fleshy machines?"
"No," the caregiver said bluntly. "Humans aren't that simple." He took a flask from the inside pocket of his coat and poured some of its contents into his coffee. "We have a wrench though, but we don't call it a wrench. We call it morphine. It's used much too often. Someone complains their back hurts, so we give them morphine. 'I have cancer,' morphine. 'I think-,' stop it, morphine. They're going to die anyway, so why not let them feel nothing."
"Then why are there doctors?"
"To temporarily relieve life's pain; after all, nothing is forever."
"I see," said the mechanic, looking a bit gloomy. "I guess everything can't be fixed then."
"Anything can be fixed, not anybody can."
"And to think I believed that we were free-will infected machines."
"No, we aren't. To be frank, we are lollipops; we start out full of life and slowly, over time, turn into nothing but waste to be thrown away." The caregiver sat back in his chair, smugly sipping his coffee.
"Well, at least in terms of metaphor, you are wrong," said the mechanic. "We are not like candy waiting to be thrown out. I'd say we're more like books; we start out empty, our pages blank, and slowly fill ourselves with stories and knowledge. We only die because we run out of pages, and every story has it's end."