White Labcoat

Short story that centers around the killing done by Nazi doctors on the disabled during and before WWII

A little boy toddled into the office of a young doctor, limping slightly as he walked. 

He had chestnut eyes, glowing, soft skin, and an ocean of hair that’s curly waves crashed along the side of his neck. His pupils strayed slightly off into the distance and his young back was abnormally hunched. He stood, not saying a word. Not making a sound. He smiled softly.

The doctor was very different from the boy. His face was covered in a scratchy beard, his hair dangled in front of his forehead, and his eyes hid behind the cover of large, shadowy glasses. It was the first day since the new order and his legs trembled beneath the long white drape of his coat and his fingers fiddled with the buttons down the center. He blew a wisp of his hair from his face and let it fall softly onto the side of his cheek. He eyed the boy fearfully, gripping an injection needle with his quivering hand, and gulped as he stared. 

He had never thought it would be this hard. 

He tried to laugh at himself. He forced out a chuckle and tugged a sour smile from his lips, trying to push away his anxiety. “Wenig unmensch!” He laughed. “Little monster!” His breathing was unsteady and he brought his hands together, putting the power of the needle into both his palms.

He got up from his chair and walked uneasily towards the boy, toddling just as the other had done when he entered the room. His eyes were blinded slightly from light reflecting through his glasses, but he advanced on the child and took his hand, leading him towards the operation table in the middle of the room. 

The little boy’s hand was clasped tightly and trustfully around the man’s pointer finger and dipped slightly with the uneven rhythm of his uneasy shuffle. The soft wind of the movements ruffled his soft sea of hair slightly, but the light refracting off each strand gleamed in the face of the man and made him cower as they walked, exposing some form of darkness he had been trying to conceal beneath the cleanliness of his coat. 

The operation table grew closer and eventually the man had to kneel down next to the small boy and pick him up to put him on the table. He could feel the fragile, tortuous spine of the boy beneath his fingers and as the boy sat hunched over on the bench, his feet dangled off the edge aimlessly, helplessly. Like his eyes, his feet had no direction and no one to tell him where to go. 

The man took one look over the boy and set his lips grimly. He tried to take his mind off the boy and the needle and his job, tried to think about what would happen when he got home. His wife would be making him a nice, warm dinner and little Peter would be running about the house with his toy plane. They would greet him at the door and tell him how wonderful he was, how great a husband, a father, a man he was. And he would kiss them both and tell them that yes, he was.

He closed his eyes. Then the needle plunged.

The boy let out a monstrous shriek. It ran from wall to wall, a slashing sword that swiftly cut the room into tiny, minuscule pieces. The world around the man seemed to crumble to the floor as the fiendish scream continued to fly about the room and cause merciless destruction. Like the wave of a stormy ocean, the screech crashed against the man and the room and tore them to shreds, leaving them beached helplessly on the sand.

As the sound died down, and the body became still, the man wiped hastily at his misty eyes, vulnerably revealing his pupils from behind his grey glasses for a few minutes before replacing them in the shadows. He wiped his hands dry on the inside of his lab coat so that the wet stains from his fingers wouldn’t taint the clean cover of his jacket. 

He carried the small boy from the table, once again feeling the fragility of the boy’s backbone, and opened the door, handing the corpse over to yet another doctor at the facility. 

“I’m ready for the next one.” He said professionally, then shut the door and began focusing on when he returned home for dinner.