X C E


Half-dead Ed the x-ray tech existed on one lung he owned and one he borrowed.   Parts of him kept disappearing, mostly mental instruments, tossed like hemostats into the autoclave.  We tolerated his fogginess because he'd gotten the cancer that we were supposed to get.  Hiding back on the loading dock, we nurses sucked hard on our Marlboros and dreaded the day that cancer would find out and come back to take our tits.

     Ed never held it against us, even though he'd never smoked.  At lunch, he'd walk serenely through our cloud to his Toyota, where he slugged whiskey.  He was depressing his brain function, depleting its oxygen supply, with the booze on top of the Vicodin he took for the transplant pain.  Someone really ought to have a talk with him, we'd say as we watched him stroll off in his green scrubs toward the long guardrails that hugged the parking lot.  Then we'd rasp the smoke back out our noses and shake with laughter.  Because in Emergency  we talked to people all day and they never listened, people who got shot in the leg because they let their babies play with the tiny loaded pistols on their key chains, people who bolted from recovery while their casts were setting,  people who tried to climb through the pitted squares of the dropped ceiling to escape the table. We had to be paid to waste our breath.  So not on Ed.

     But he sent us a message.   During surgery one day the x-ray screen began communicating information other than bone. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee appeared in a steady parade over the solid white of an ankle, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.  And at first we didn't say anything because who needed more fucking trouble during a procedure.  But eventually the surgeon would look up at the screen to check the image of the screw he was inserting and he'd see the message too. Goddamnit, Ed, he'd yell, wake up.  And the circulating would scoot from her desk to nudge Ed, hunched over the keypad at the end of the C-arm, his nose depressing a button as he wheezed softly.  Always the e, like there was something in it.    

American Short Fiction Web exclusive February 2012