This was an English assignment in which I was asked to write a short, descriptive story. 'Fantastic', I thought, until the writer's block set in and I sat staring at a blank page for about an hour. This is not a true story, and I have no idea what inspired me to write a story set in a hospital but that's what happened. I do intend to finish it but I don't want it to turn into anything more than a short story. Please critique, all comments are welcome. Also, any ideas for titles are more than welcome, I find titles incredibly difficult!
‘You can go in now’, was the pale, sympathetic but clearly rehearsed whisper that beckoned the young boy away from the waiting area. A deep, long breath and a few motionless seconds was all it took for him to drag himself from his seat in the furthest, darkest corner of the waiting room.
He followed the nurse, who was completely clad in white, with one blue pen and one red pen tucked into the breast pocket of her long white coat. Her shoulder length blonde hair neatly coifed and her face made up to perfectly match the pictures on the covers of every magazine that had always remained neatly stacked on the coffee table in the corner of the room.
She led him to a door where she stopped and held it open, ushering him through although she seemed unwilling to proceed herself. He turned and looked back along the corridor through which he had been led and noticed that in his nervous excitement, he had not taken in his surroundings at all. The corridor was long, at least 200 metres he thought to himself. All along there were doors on either side, and every few metres signs and notices hung from the walls and ceiling, shining in the powerful white glow that illuminated every crevice of the entire building, giving a sterile and clean feel to the miles of white corridors.
The halls were lined with clichés, a dozen other nurses, almost indistinguishable from each other hurried through the halls, darting this way and that into rooms and hallways, each going somewhere which he thought must be important by the way they strode so purposefully across the hard floor. As a door opened, the ‘Beep…Beep’ of a life support machine echoed through the halls then faded when the door swung shut. A slight grin creased across his face as he felt like he had seen this exact scene the night before on some hospital drama, and he remembered that he had thought to himself that it wouldn’t really be like that.
He stood and stared for what felt like an age, and he felt alone, like he was watching himself through a pane of glass in his own world. A hand rested on his shoulder and he flung himself violently away from it, turning back to his guide who had reached through the glass and forced him out. Gravity struck him, his stomach turned and his head span, the long corridor began to curve and the hand’s grip on his shoulder became more desperate as he felt himself lose balance and slump down onto the floor, his back propped up against the wall.
Colour and definition melted from his vision, and the panicked voice of the nurse sounded as though it had echoed through a cave before it reached him. His eyes shut and he forced them open again, the glare of a lamp above him dominating his vision. He blinked away the haze and tried to push himself upright with his elbow, but the floor gave little resistance against his arm. For a moment his mind panicked, his heart spiked and his stomach felt like a vacuum. It soon passed as he felt the pillows behind his head, and the rest of the bed around him.
Another echo tried to define itself through the cave, and a familiar shape outlined itself in the glare overhead. With shoulder length brown hair tucked behind her ears the nurse beckoned him out of his cave with a warm smile, which he felt reflecting itself across his own face. Her smile was infectious, spreading to anyone nearby. You couldn’t help but smile. It radiated a gentle affection which he barely remembered ever feeling before, although he somehow knew he had.
The nurse’s long white coat shone in the white glow of the lamp overhead, one red pen and one blue pen perched in her breast pocket and he couldn’t help but marvel at the perfect symmetry between all the staff in the hospital. Even the male staff shared some resemblance with the women, not something you could see but they all had the same presence about them. Not only were the staff here perfect images of each other, they also represented every doctor, nurse, surgeon in every hospital everywhere.
