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They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale. It was like someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked, trying to turn me inside out and failing and trying again. Like that, while somebody else kneed me in the groin. For eight hours on Saturday, I said—On Saturday, someone interrupted, I was surrounded by people at this point, some busy with IVs or electrodes but most, it seemed, just looking at me, asking me to answer questions I had already answered, wanting to hear everything afresh. In my own words, they said, not the words they had heard from others, the words that had summoned them here, from all corners of the huge hospital I was lucky to have almost in my backyard, just a mile from my house—on Saturday and you waited until today to come in, the voice said, you must be the stoic type. Stoic or stupid, I thought. For eight hours I had lain on the sofa in the room where I write, where I spend most of my time, reading or writing, though really I hadn’t lain, I had crouched on all fours, I had curled into myself, clutching my stomach, I had held my balls as if to shield them in my hand. It didn’t occur to me to go to the hospital, in part because for months I had thought of hospitals and doctors, of medical offices of all kinds, as the last places one would go for help, as dangerous places, in the pandemic the likeliest places to get infected, everyone I knew felt the same. Only if you were dying would you go to the hospital and it didn’t occur to me that I could be dying. I wonder if anyone ever imagines they’re dying, even as it happens, or if anyone imagines it without being sick for a long time, people like me, I mean, who have always been more or less healthy and more or less strong, hale, as my grandparents said, as my mother sometimes says, or said until now, counting her blessings, all of her children hearty and hale. I didn’t imagine anything as I lay there, as I crouched or curled, nothing occurred to me, when I try to remember my thoughts they come broken and scrambled. I be- came a thing without words in those hours, a creature evacuated of soul. I spoke only once, when L came down from his office upstairs—we both work during the day, we’re used to hours of silence, our life together depends on measuring out solitude and company—and tapped on my door and receiving no reply opened it slowly, gingerly, until he saw me where I lay and spoke in alarm. What happened, he said, what’s wrong, he was speaking Spanish though it was an English day, we alternate days, each of us likes living in the other’s language. I must have grunted or moaned, made some sound, because he said But tell me, please, what is it, and I told him I was sick, it was the most I could manage, I said I was sick through gritted teeth, taking shallow breaths; if I breathed too deeply the pain was worse, the fist in my gut twisted at the wrist. Vamos al médico, L said, his tone resolute, stern, he knelt by the sofa and put his hand on my back, right now, vamos. When I shook my head no he began to argue, an argument we’ve had often, anytime I feel even slightly unwell he insists we go to the doctor; in his country the health system works as it should, he has a European sense of what it means to be ill. Always, nearly always, I refused, even before the pandemic; I’ve always hated doctors, a sense I got as a child, I suppose, that things usually pass, that doctors waste your money and your time, you wait for hours and they send you home the same or sicker. An American attitude or a Kentucky attitude maybe, most of my siblings share it. But I couldn’t argue with him now, I said Please, guapo, I can’t, and when he started to speak again I said please, I love you, I can’t talk, I need to be alone. I knew it would hurt him but it was true, I couldn’t be considerate, pain had sealed me off from sociability. Okay, he said, standing up, okay bello, these were our names for each other, guapo and bello, silly lovers’ names, and then he left without saying anything more, closing the door quietly behind him.

For eight hours the pain lasted and then, not all at once but slowly, gradually, I couldn’t have said when it happened, it began to ease; the fist relaxed its grip, I could breathe again and think. The pain didn’t go away, I told the doctors, but it felt manageable, I could bear it, I could stand up and talk with L, who had been beside himself with worry, he said; he had looked in on me many times over the hours but I hadn’t noticed, once he had called my name but I hadn’t heard. It was something I ate, I told him, food poisoning, and when he said again I should go to the hospital I said it was passing already, it was nothing, it would go away on its own. And the fever, one of the doctors said, when did that start, and I said The same day as the pain, I don’t know what time it started but that evening I had chills and aches in all my limbs, so of course I thought it was Covid, a Google search found that sometimes people did have stomach pains, it was a rare symptom but not unheard of. Basically nothing is unheard of, the nurse said to me days after the pain started, when finally I did want to go to urgent care and they insisted I get a Covid test first, six months into the pandemic and we still know so little about this disease. The fever was highest on the first day, I said to the doctor, about 102, then it fell off, on the other days it hovered around 100. The pain never went away, I went on, but for the next two days it was bearable, it felt like a normal stomachache almost, indigestion and bloating, and the pain in my groin faded too, I could walk and talk, I didn’t have much appetite but I could read and work a little. And then yesterday it got worse again, the pain in my stomach but especially a new pain in my lower back, I thought maybe I had wrenched it on the first day when I was in so much pain. It got so bad that I couldn’t sleep, even fitfully, I couldn’t sleep at all, so finally I called urgent care. L had made me call, was the truth of it, he got so upset finally I couldn’t bear it, and the morning after the Covid test came back negative (the hospital had set up a drive-through clinic, I rolled down my window and they stuck the long swab up my nose) I drove—You drove, the doctor said, and I said What else was I going to do, of course I drove—to urgent care. L wanted to come but it wasn’t permitted, there were new policies in the pandemic and patients had to come alone. He was in the kitchen when I left, still in his pajamas—he wore real pajamas, not just a T-shirt and sweats but actual clothes for sleeping: he likes a sense of ceremony about things, for each moment to be considered; a day should be a work of art, he likes to say. The ones he wore now had a pattern of little deer; he ordered them after we moved into our new neighborhood, where there were many deer, we both gasped in wonder to see them in our yard on winter mornings, it seemed magical to us and especially to L, who had never seen them before coming to America. I laughed the first time I saw the pajamas, he came to bed in them and we both laughed, his pijama de ciervos. He hugged me before I left. It’s good you’re going, he said, you’ll find out what it is and they’ll make it better, and he stood at the door as I pulled out of the drive, watching me leave.

It was very early, I was the first person at the clinic when it opened. The woman at registration asked me to wait at the door while she pulled on her face shield, not the flimsy almost disposable kind I had seen around town but made of a thick hard plastic, black, almost military. It was open in the back but otherwise it resembled the helmets police were wearing at the demonstrations that filled the news, protests that were largely about the militarization and brutality of the police, brutality that began, I sometimes thought, with the helmets and armor that sealed them off from the people they faced. The nurse who saw me was tired and kind, patient as I told for the first time the story I would soon tire of telling. She took a urine sample and did an exam, palpating my stomach, listening to my lungs. She called in another nurse and asked to examine my testicles, then told me to lean against the bed while she inserted a finger in my ass, the first humiliation, I thought, a visit to the doctor is always humiliating, but she was quick about it, efficient. The second nurse ducked out as I pulled up my pants and the first nurse gestured for me to sit, not on the examination table but in the chair near the computer, so that I was a person again, not just a patient. There were things she could rule out, she said, based on the urine sample and the exam, there wasn’t a bladder infection or a hernia, or any of a long list of maladies she recited, I don’t remember everything she said. We could do blood work that might rule out other things, but really you need imaging and that we can’t do here. The obvious worry is appendicitis, and even if the blood work ruled that out I’d want a CT to see if something else showed up. So I want you to go to the ER, she said, I’m sorry, I know it isn’t what you hoped to hear but I think it’s the best course. There were two options in town, the huge university hospital and a much smaller, private facility, where the wait would probably be shorter. It was up to me where I went but since the urgent care was run by the university her notes would automatically be transferred to them, they could see the tests she had run and the things she had ruled out, they wouldn’t have to call to be briefed. She looked at the computer. And you have university insurance, she said, are you faculty, and I said I wasn’t, my partner was, I had insurance through him. It was expensive, they took hundreds from L’s paycheck each month; we were lucky they had domestic partner insurance at all but it cost twice what it would have if we were married. We complained about it every month but we didn’t want to be married, we both hated marriage. I had thought about dropping it and finding something cheaper, or even going without for a while, I was healthy and still thought of myself as young, young-ish; I thought of myself as lucky is what I mean, I guess, though really I didn’t think of my health much at all, which was the luck, the privilege of health. Okay, I said to the nurse, I’ll go to the university, and she nodded and stood, moving on already to the next patient, of which there were many now, when I stepped into the sitting area there were a dozen people waiting.

There were many more people waiting at the ER, where nearly every seat was taken, all the seats that hadn’t been blocked off by tape, signs with the words Social Distancing warning people away. At the entrance, in a cubicle behind plexiglass between two sets of sliding doors, a woman took my name and date of birth, then instructed me to stand on an X marked on the floor, so that an instrument mounted above could scan my temperature as she asked if I had any symptoms of Covid, in which case I would have to go to a different part of the hospital. It was the end of August, students had just come back to town, to everyone’s dismay; the summer had been calm, without a huge number of cases, but now the bars and fraternity houses were packed, as though nothing were wrong, and of course there was a surge, a second wave people said, though really I thought the worst was still to come, in winter when all the parties would move inside. Already the rooms the university had designated for quarantine were full, the hospital had sent up flares about scarce resources and few beds, already it was worse than it had been in the spring, when the students were sent home and the city became its summer self, relaxed and nearly empty, a calm that felt like siege but also we sensed we were spared. The state was being aggressive about ending lockdown and insisted on in-person classes, all thirty thousand students were called back to town. It’s like watching a car drive straight off a cliff, a friend said, but slowly, deliberately, a slow-motion suicide. Everywhere in the ER there were signs reminding us to wear masks but not everyone did, or they pulled them off to talk on the phone, to eat or drink, or they didn’t cover their nose. I wished I had more protection than the surgical mask I was wearing, I would have liked a face shield of my own, I would have liked not to be there at all. The room was large and open, but there was a section somewhat sheltered by a kind of partition, wooden slats framing a medium-sized aquarium, of the sort I associated with cheap restaurants with pretensions to class; it was the part of the room farthest from the door where nurses appeared to call people’s names, maybe that’s why I found an open seat there. The aquarium was meant to be soothing, I guess, like everything else in the room. The TVs were cycling nature images, a purling stream, grain swaying in sunlight; later this switched to a montage of high school choirs from around the state, singing hymns and spirituals and patriotic songs, which didn’t calm me at all actually, which did the opposite, as did the fish: one huge bottom-feeder, too large for the tank, which lumbered from one corner to another, gumming the pebbles at the bottom, and a dozen or so smaller fish, bright and hyperactive, zipping miserably back and forth.

A screen mounted at the front of the room said the wait was two hours, so I was surprised to be called back so quickly, after fifteen minutes or so; maybe I wouldn’t be there all day, I thought. I moved slowly, the pain wasn’t debilitating but it was bad enough. I moved too slowly for the woman who called my name, who had let the door swing shut and retreated to the interior before I could reach her, then opened it again after I had waited a minute or two, motioning me impatiently through. I only had time to glimpse the main area, the department or ward: there was a central bank of what looked like cubicles, plexiglass partitions behind which doctors and nurses and technicians sat at computers or leaned on desks, all in masks but many with their face shields lifted, and then corridors of examination rooms stretching back, some with doors and some with drawn curtains. There were patients in the corridors as well, people lying on stretchers pushed against walls, all of them alone—it seemed terrible to me that they were alone, as I was alone; even if we didn’t have the virus it had still cut us off, whatever we were facing we would face it alone. Seeing them made me frightened, for the first time; my sense that everything would be all right faltered. But I was being dramatic, I chided myself, I wasn’t really cut off, my phone was in my pocket, I had already texted L with updates, he had texted back his love. Even if it was appendicitis that wasn’t a disaster, it would mean surgery but a routine surgery, it was something that could be fixed. The woman led me to a scale, then asked me my name and date of birth before fastening a plastic bracelet around my wrist, which had a barcode that would be scanned dozens of times each day, with every medication and procedure, every vial they took of my blood. We were in a little alcove with a curtain she left undrawn, I sat in a chair while she took my blood pressure and temperature, she stood at a computer mounted to a wall taking notes while I spoke. Mm-hmm, she hummed at regular intervals, which seemed less encouragement than skepticism. I disliked her, I realized, I felt an antipathy she hadn’t earned. Probably she was exhausted; I can’t imagine it, day after day seeing people in pain, at their worst moments, over years; how could you protect yourself from that, I wondered, there was some human regard I wanted from her that I had no right to demand. You can head back out now, she said, turning from the computer. We’re a little full at the moment, as you can see, you’re going to be waiting for a while. Oh, I said, they sent me here for a CT scan, can you schedule that, but she made a dismissive sound. She couldn’t schedule anything, a doctor would have to see me first, and for a doctor to see me they would need to put me in a room, and who knew when they would have a room available, she said as she ushered me back through the door, you can see how many people are waiting already.

My seat was still free, far from the entrance to the ward and facing the sad aquarium. I had a book with me and tried to read, but I was distracted by discomfort—hunching over eased my stomach but aggravated my back, which nothing could soothe, not standing or sitting or walking to the little alcove with vending machines—and also by the noise and shuffle of the people around me, the drama of the place. Shortly after I sat down again there was a bit of commotion, a security guard appeared in front of the doors leading to the main hospital, not far from where I sat, and turned away anyone who tried to pass from either side, patient or staff, saying they had to walk outside to another entrance, that the ER was on lockdown. A man entered shortly after, cuffed at the hands and feet and with a chain around his waist, an elaborate restraint, and further restrained by two guards, one at each side. A kind of shudder went through the room, the noise quieted as people looked and quickly looked away, then looked again, as I did. The guards weren’t hospital employees, they had guns strapped to their waists, they wore uniforms from the state prison. The man between them was a convict out of central casting, huge with fat and muscle, maybe 6ʹ5ʺ with a shaved head and tattoos up both arms. We all watched as he shuffled to the registration desk and then to a seat; the guards removed the tape and social distancing signs to sit on either side of him. He kept his eyes on the floor, looking at no one. He didn’t wait long, he must have been given priority, almost immediately he was on his feet again for the triage nurse and didn’t reappear. There was something terrible about watching the people around me, terrible and irresistible, I wanted to see into their lives but I had no right to; it was an intrusion, like looking into the lit windows of houses at night, which is something else I can’t resist, when L and I take walks through the neighborhood after dark my eyes are drawn to every lit pane. Most of the people in the waiting room were like windows left dark, blank or withdrawn, scrolling on their phones or staring into space.

A nurse brought a man into the room from the ward, and stationed him in a corner of the area where I sat, a spot left free of seats to accommodate wheelchairs. Immediately he started talking, not to anyone in particular but not to himself, either. I can’t stay here, he said, I can’t wait so long, I need my wife, he began saying, please, I need my wife. The hospital’s policy was that adult patients should come alone, it was a precaution against the virus, but exceptions were made for those needing assistance, you could call and make your case, surely they would have allowed his wife to come. He had begun moving his head in a strange, distressed way, throwing it back and then rolling it from left to right, Please, he said, his mask had slipped beneath his nose but he didn’t replace it, please, I need my wife, I want to call my wife. I felt a tension I’ve grown familiar with, between desire to help and inhibition, I’ve felt it all my life; there’s a kind of moral paralysis I sometimes feel, a moral weakness I mean, one stands by and so is culpable. Maybe if it weren’t for the pandemic I would have offered him my phone; in general I felt like my social instincts, my sense of sociality, my humanness I want to say had atrophied in lockdown. For months I had hardly left my house, I had touched no one but L. We were forgetting how to be with one another in physical space, I thought, how to be creatures living with other creatures, the long transition to virtuality had been sped up by the virus. But then I remembered the student parties, the protests and the president’s rallies, I shouldn’t generalize; plenty of people still wanted to be together in a way I never had. Finally a woman stood, another patient, and went to him and spoke, simply, matter-of-factly, not with any particular solicitude, asking him if she could help. I need my wife, the man said again, I need to call my wife and I don’t have a phone, I need my wife. Well, the woman said, there’s a phone in that other corner, and she pointed across the room, if you want I can help you get over there. But the man didn’t want this; he would push himself, he said, and then quickly he got stuck, when he tried to maneuver around the wooden partition he couldn’t manage the turn, and without saying anything more the woman took hold of the handles on the back of the chair and pushed him through. It wasn’t hard, I thought, watching as people in their path made room for them, pulling in their legs, rearranging bags; decency wasn’t hard, you saw someone in trouble and you helped them out of it. The man spoke loudly into the phone, You need to come get me, he said, I can’t wait here all day. I need to lay down, he said, there’s nowhere for me to lay down. He raised his voice to say No, repeating it, no, no, you need to come, you need to come, and then after a moment he dropped the phone back in its cradle. She won’t come, he said to the woman, who had remained beside him, and then fell silent, only shaking his head when she asked if he wanted to call anybody else. The woman returned him to his corner and he closed his eyes and let his chin drop to his chest. She stood beside him a moment, hesitating, now she too was unsure what she should do, and then returned to her seat. Maybe he would sleep, I thought, wondering if the woman he had called had been cruel or if she was acting in his best interest; maybe it had been difficult to get him here, maybe she knew he needed to stay. I didn’t hear him say anything else; he became another darkened window, not a story anymore but a blank page.

Two hours had passed when my name was called again, and a different nurse took me to the same alcove, where she drew blood before sending me out to wait some more. I was texting L every fifteen minutes or so, and as time passed he grew more indignant, I don’t understand this country, he said, you wait so long and you pay so much. But his indignation didn’t help. I was spending more time with my arms wrapped around my stomach, my eyes closed; the pain still wasn’t as bad as it had been on the first day but it was getting decidedly worse, it was all I could think about. I stopped answering L’s texts as they came, only after he had texted a second or a third time did I reply. It had become engrossing, the pain, it had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence; I wasn’t impatient or bored, there was something fascinating and dreadful about the experience of my body. I began negotiating with it, with the pain or with my body, I’m not sure which, or if a meaningful distinction could be drawn: if it stays here, at this level, if it doesn’t get worse, I can bear it, it isn’t unbearable yet. I was surprised, when I was called into the ward a third time, to see that four hours had passed. It was as if the room were exempt from time, a little enclave outside its regime: many of the people I passed, as I walked toward the woman holding open the door, were the same people, the room was more crowded but it seemed hardly anyone had moved. I hadn’t seen this woman before; she led me to the alcove and told me she was the nurse practitioner on the ward, a distinction I didn’t understand except that it marked some degree of authority, a rank in a hierarchy, we still don’t have a room for you but we want to keep the ball rolling. She was friendlier than the first nurse I had spoken to but the friendliness didn’t mean anything, it was just her way of bearing up. The news was full of nurses and doctors who weren’t bearing up, there were too many patients and too many of them were dying, and not just dying but dying alone; videos circulated of nurses, still in their scrubs, in tears recounting how they held phones or iPads so patients could say goodbye to their families, how even then they had to ration the time, five minutes and no more, so many patients were dying and waiting for their chance to call. It was her way of enduring, I thought of the nurse and her grating cheer, who was I to judge it. She asked me to repeat the story of what had happened but kept interrupting, wanting me to speed things up. When I said that the urgent care nurse had been concerned about appendicitis she cut me off, saying they weren’t too worried about that, my blood work had come back and there weren’t any indications of appendicitis, we’d expect your white blood cell counts to be higher; but she wanted me to have a CT scan anyway, to see if they could figure out what was going on. Her tone suggested there was no reason to worry, it dismissed all doubt, and I thought of the things I had said to L over the past days, that it would be a waste of time to go to the ER, that they would just send me home and tell me to wait it out; I felt vindicated by her tone.

She had drawn a curtain across the front of the alcove, making a private space, and now it fluttered, someone on the other side had taken hold of it but waited to pull it open until the nurse said to come in. A short broad woman in a set of green scrubs entered—the scrubs were part of the hierarchy, too, I realized, a code I would try to decipher. She pulled a small metal cart behind her. You’ll need an IV for the scan, the nurse practitioner said, we’ll get that in and then imaging will come get you when they’re ready. And then she was gone, closing the curtain behind her, and the new woman and I were alone. She asked me how I was and reflexively I said fine, and then after a pause we both laughed a little. Yeah, she said, she spoke with a South American accent, Colombian maybe, I guess if you were fine you wouldn’t be here. She took her time, opening drawers and pulling out various supplies, unfolding a pad over the top of the cart, on which she set her instruments as she asked me if I had had an IV before. Many times, I told her, though it had been years; I had never spent the night in a hospital before but I had had a couple of surgeries when I was young, normal childhood things, and then when I was desperate for money in graduate school I had taken part in a study that required me, once a month for six months, to spend an afternoon sitting with a line in my arm. It was an HIV study, research for a vaccine, there was a bag of medication followed by a bag of what they called fluids; I don’t remember the drug but I was paid a hundred dollars for each day I spent there. Sometimes they have trouble with my veins, I told the woman as she tied the tourniquet on my left bicep—she had asked which hand I used more, whether I was a righty or a lefty—and she hummed noncommittally, turning my arm so she could examine it. She ran her gloved fingers from the crook of my elbow to the wrist, pausing about halfway, where the scars began; this always happened, sometimes doctors ask about them and sometimes they don’t, sometimes they ask about mental health, about depression, ideation, and I say it was decades ago, a quarter century, ancient history—she paused but just briefly, she didn’t say a word. I liked her, I decided. She made a noise of disappointment, then started tapping my arm with three fingers, asking me to make a fist and release several times. She sighed then, They weren’t lying to you, she said, they are a little hard to find, let’s try the other arm, and she drew my right hand toward her. She repeated the same motions up and down, tapping the veins while I made a fist, and then she returned to the crook of my arm and pressed again with her fingers. There you are, she said, why were you hiding, and it made me like her more. Then there was a quick swipe of alcohol and she asked me to release my hand, to breathe deep and relax, and the needle slid in. It hardly hurt at all, she was good at her job, but then as always happens she had to adjust the needle, pushing it in more deeply and moving it side to side, that’s the real pain. Her head was tilted forward and I looked at her hair; it wasn’t long, maybe shoulder length, but it was thick and brown, and she had bound it with a pink elastic, something a schoolkid might wear, frivolous, needlessly pretty, I liked her very much. This is just saline, she said, screwing a syringe into the IV, and as she pressed the plunger there was a taste or smell at the back of my throat, something like rubbing alcohol, a kind of ghost impression. She saw me sense it, Weird, right, she said. We call that the taste of victory, it means the IV’s working, I thought I lost the vein for a minute but it behaved. She placed a broad piece of transparent tape over the needle with its two wings, another narrower piece of tape securing the plastic tube she coiled beneath. Okay, she said, you’re all set. She told me to go back to the waiting room, someone would call me for the next step; I wondered how many steps there would be. How long have you been waiting, she asked as I stood, and I shrugged, Five hours or so, I said. She sucked her breath between her teeth. It’s been bad the last few days, she said, I’m sorry. I hope you can go home soon.

There were no seats in the waiting room now, people were sitting on the floor and standing in corners, it was like an airport in bad weather. In the spring there had been stories in the news about hospitals reaching capacity, about protocols for turning people away to die, not just patients with Covid but other patients, too: people with heart attacks, crash victims, all the myriad ways people approach death, but not just them; pregnant women, too, or people with conditions that should be simple matters, like the appendicitis I might have had, all of them turned away because at a certain point the system breaks down, it was unthinkable and also it was true. In the early months of the pandemic it had been terrible in Spain, there were stories of old people being turned away, of a terrible calculus, scarce resources saved for younger patients, likelier to survive. Hijos de puta, L had shouted, streaming the Spanish news, hijos de puta, and again when Republicans here began arguing against shutdown, saying the elderly would make the sacrifice willingly, for the good of the nation, it was a patriotic duty; hijos de puta, he shouted at them through the screen, los mayores son la patria. He was thinking of his father, I knew, who had died the summer before. L had been devastated but also he knew they had been lucky, the family had been together, they had cared for his father in his final weeks, they had fed him and bathed him, they had been together when he died. A year later and he would have died alone. A la cárcel, he said, about the politicians and the doctors, too, though the doctors didn’t have a choice, I thought. About the politicians I agreed, I wanted to see them all in prison, every last one, but what choice did the doctors have, they weren’t politicians, they couldn’t bluff or bully their way through, they were slammed against the rock of reality, and when all choices are unacceptable one still has to choose. In the spring that hadn’t happened here, it hadn’t been like New York or Seattle, even with cases flown in from across the state they had never filled all the rooms. But now it had come, I thought, perched in the well of a window in the waiting room, and it was still only August, in the winter it would be worse. I couldn’t imagine more people fitting into the ER, already people were disregarding the signs placed on seats. A tall thin man was trying to clean the floor, riding some kind of motorized vehicle that swept and mopped, but it was useless, he couldn’t find a path through, even as he repeatedly said Excuse me, too loudly, either in frustration or because of the earbuds he wore. The sound he made competed with a woman’s moans, a woman in a wheelchair not far from where I had been sitting earlier; at first they seemed like wordless moans but in fact she was saying I can’t, repeating it again and again, the words drawn out and broken by sobs. I had thought she was an old woman but glancing again I saw she wasn’t, she was in her midthirties maybe, and pregnant; I hadn’t noticed her belly at first because she was hunched forward in the chair. She wasn’t alone, a man was with her, she must have gotten special dispensation; a young man I thought, his face was young though he was nearly bald already, maybe that was why at first glance I had thought that they were old. He was holding one of her hands in both of his, or trying to; she kept twisting her hand free and he kept taking it again, stroking it, letting go only long enough to push her hair out of her face. She was obviously in distress, in pain, but no one came, she wasn’t triaged out. She had to wait like everyone else.


Copyright © 2024 by Garth Greenwell

Copyright © 2017 by Frank Bidart

Copyright © 2023 by Luis Muñoz

Copyright © 2007, 2012, 2014 by Les Murray

Copyright © 1962 by George Oppen