7 DAY STORY WRITING CHALLENGE #11 WINNER

Prize: £500

Finalists:

The following writers just missed out on the top spot!

Magical Realism: Russell Mickler, Roxanne Kubiak, Marie Hanna Curran, L M Delucy, Teresa Curry, Matthew Gardiner, M.J. Benjamin.

Historical Fiction: Linea Jantz, J.L. Theoret, Jan Sargeant, Patrick Johnson, Sam Patchitt, A.T. Pennington, R. Chandlay.

Science Fiction: Wendy Markel, Drew Reynolds, Yingli, Sean Thomas McDonnell, Lisa H. Owens, Ian Belknap, Laurissa Havins, Anne Wilkins.

Gothic Fiction: Maddie Logemann, Angela Huskisson, Lydia Morsman, Lin Whitehouse.

Surrealism: Galen Gower, Michael D Lanen, Rosalyn Robilliard, Patrick Spiker, Madeleine Armstrong, Angela C. Young, Anna Perrett, David Klotzkin, Ross Sullivan.

Paranormal Fiction: Thomas Brodkin, Malcolm Woodstock, Nemzetes Zsolt, Ed McConnell, Margaret Duffy, Anne Elliot, Phoebe Thomas, Liz Williamson, Robert Burns, Alyson Tait, E. D. Human, Gavin Taylor, Christopher Moak.

Romance: Charlie Henderson, Karina O, Andrea Doig.

Tragicomedy: Tinamarie Cox, Lisa Verdekal, Dhevalence Moodley, Emily Elledge, Tim Deschênes.

Grimdark: Rae S. Earley.

Political Fiction: Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos, Julie Staines, Nelly Shulman, Annie Batterman.

Domestic Drama: Alice Febles, Lily Steinberg, Claire Louise Marsh, Nikki England, Kim Barton, Chris Morris.

Philosophical Fiction: Joyce Bingham, J. A. Irving, Laura Varney, Veronica McDonald.

and the winner is…

Elizabeth Koch

BOLT

(MAGICAL REALISM)

Dr. Hen was thirty-three and already too old to believe in miraculous recoveries, honest patients, and the selfless benevolence of doctors. She hadn’t, however, entirely made up her mind about witches, fairy-folk, or jinns. 

The patient lying on the hospital bed before her certainly looked like a jinn. He was bald, which to Dr. Hen seemed quite practical for squeezing in and out of lamps and bottles and whatever else hermit-crab vessels such beings might inhabit, and appeared to be in fact completely hairless except for a long twist of beard at the end of his chin, so black as to gleam almost blue. His skin looked like gold trapped beneath cinnamon, and he smelled delicious. She couldn’t put her finger on it, not cumin or paprika but some other musk of meat and desert and flame. She sucked on her teeth as she bent close to read his wristband. Its printed string of mounded consonants and oracular vowels matched the entry on her tablet, next to the diagnoses catatonia, schizophrenia, major depressive disorder. 

“Well,” Hen whispered to the sharp bird-like nose, “Who could blame you? Asleep for a thousand years, only to wake to all this.” She flourished her tablet to nothing and no one in particular, then began entering the man’s vitals in the pad’s blinking blue boxes.

When she looked up, she nearly let out a little yelp. The patient’s purple-veined eyelids had snapped open, and a pair of chartreuse irises regarded her with great intensity. Composing herself, Dr. Hen reached out and touched one fingertip to the patient’s forearm. It felt comfortingly warm, like smoking coffee or fresh baked strudel. 

“Can I help you?” It was the only thing she could think of to say. As if the man had just stepped into a hotel lobby.

The patient’s lips barely parted as he croaked in a dry whisper, “Help me.”

Dr. Hen looked around. Perhaps the psychiatrist should see this, but Dr. Nassur hadn’t yet arrived. She leaned over the patient. “Help you how?” She was unimpressed with her words. They clanged uselessly against her own eardrums, saying nothing. A bad script.

“Don’t let them,” the patient hissed between his teeth, “Don’t let them put me to sleep.”

Well, this is awkward, Hen wanted to say, Because I’m the one who does that. Instead, she added another fingertip to the first against the patient’s arm. “You’re here for your procedure,” she said soothingly. Experience warned her not to say any more. 

The patient gave what must have been a laugh but sounded more like a vacuous choking sound. His chest vibrated from the unaccustomed effort. “The same procedure,” he breathed between laugh-chokes, “Across the ages.” His eyes slid leftward. 

Hen followed his gaze to the box on its metal cart, its scrolling paper tongue neatly coiled in its mouth, its windshield-wiper needle still and at the ready. She heard the patient mutter, “How coldly efficient. They needn’t even wait for lightning.”

His voice cracked with the strain of speech. Hen wanted to offer him water, but knew she couldn’t extend even this simple kindness. She canceled a few anesthetics a week for violating NPO guidelines. Nil Per Os, nothing by mouth. Hen liked to recite the lovely Latin names of cruel medical abbreviations. ECT, she reminded herself glumly, stood only for Electroconvulsive Therapy.

“Doesn’t even have the decency to be pretty,” she murmured.

“No,” agreed the patient, as if he’d caught the kite string of her thoughts, “At least the lightning had its harsh beauty. Have you ever been the tallest thing in a thunderstorm?” 

I am talking to a madman, Hen thought, Dress it up in DSM-V labels, but that’s what he is. No jinn, just…

Sick? Someone else finished her thought. Hen squeezed her eyes shut, then forced them open. The room was quiet. The man’s bright green gaze was still upon her. It occurred to her then that she had yet to see him blink.

I am sick, the thought that was not her own unspooled in her head, But you can make me well again. Please, please don’t do it. Don’t let them put me to sleep. 

As Hen felt the panic start to rise in her throat, she heard the clicking of heels against tired linoleum. Turning, she let out an audible sigh of relief to see Dr. Nassur charge into the room. The psychiatrist always seemed to be rushing headlong after some mean objective, something Hen found familiar in her usual dealings with surgeons, but discordant in a specialist of broken minds. 

“Let’s get started, shall we?” Nassur clipped, briskly unwinding a knot of wires and sticking electrodes to their ends.

Hen bit back her reminder that she had been there for nearly an hour before the psychiatrist showed up, and instead gestured to the patient in the bed. “Dr. Nassur, before we do, you might want to look at this.”

Nassur’s movements stopped, and her impeccably drawn brows arched up at Hen. “What exactly am I looking at?”

“This—” Hen whirled round to point at a pair of purple-veined eyelids placidly shut on the patient’s bronze face. She heard herself stammering, “He—the patient was awake. He was speaking to me. He asked me—” 

One glance at Dr. Nassur’s eyebrows, descending from their position of surprise to arrange themselves into one of skeptical annoyance, was enough to quiet Hen’s ramblings. Hen’s mouth formed the ghosts of words as she looked down at her hand, still resting on the man’s arm. She withdrew her fingers as if they’d been singed. 

Dr. Nassur shook her head. “I think you’ve been working too much, Dr. Hen. We see it all the time.”

Hen didn’t ask what exactly “it” was, and with her face burning, ducked under the cords connecting the patient to the monitor until she stood at the head of his bed. It happened, I know it did, she thought as she fixed the plastic bag-mask over the patient’s nose and mouth, But what does it matter? I am still doing the same thing I would have done if it hadn’t happened. 

She watched the yellow parabolas trace themselves on the screen and Dr. Nassur squeeze mint-colored gel onto the electrodes and press them onto the man’s temples. The nurses shuffled into the room and recited the time-out dispassionately from their clipboard. Hen could feel the onus of this collaborative act slip off her conscience, lighten her. She was not doing this thing to the man. She was just a player in a scene already written, no, already played out. Practically in syndication. 

But as Hen fitted the syringe of barbiturate onto the man’s IV line, she wondered. She wondered what would happen if she didn’t push the drugs and squeeze the bag to inflate the man’s lungs and let Dr. Nassur press the innocuous round button that would shock his neurons into factory reset mode. Would the reel still play on its tired loop? Would she still be the same tired Hen?

Her thumb was getting sore, cocked as it was against the syringe stopper. Hen looked up, sweat beginning to bead under her clothes. They were all looking at her expectantly. In the syringe, the drug looked clear and innocent as water.

You know exactly what will happen if you push it, the thought that was not her own reasoned in her head, Don’t you want to find out something you don’t already know?

She looked down at the patient. His eyelids looked like dragonfly wings. He had no eyelashes. Please, please don’t do this.

Hen dropped the syringe. “Dr. Nassur, I can’t do this.”

Nassur threw up her hands and eyes as if she had known this would happen. “What is the problem?” 

“The patient’s condition has changed. He spoke to me, he woke up.”

Rather than refuting her, Dr. Nassur fixed a scathing glare on Hen, then pointedly down at the patient. Hen withered as she too stared at the upside-down face, which by all observable metrics remained…catatonic. She felt her own face grow hot, her ridiculousness sharpening at the edges with every beep of the patient’s pulse on the monitor. She kept her eyes down, busying with the mask and the cords and tidying her syringes, lacking the courage to peer up and see all the eyes avoiding hers. Whatever voice she had heard in her head had fallen silent. Probably, she admitted, because it had only been her own, the same trivial sparks of firing neurons whose patterns seemed magical only to her.

Dr. Nassur was making short jerky movements as she snapped the electrodes and wound their wires, muttering how she had never in her long career encountered so absurd…. The nurses murmured consolingly, warily checking Hen for any taken offense. But Hen was too humiliated, too incredulous with herself to be angry with them. What had she been thinking? This was something different, all right. She would be hearing about it from her chief once Nassur called him, as she would surely do as soon as she stomped out of the room. She could hear the break room whispers now among the nurse anesthetists: “Doctor Hen went as batty as the patients. I heard she was hearing voices. Complete meltdown, refused to do the case.”

This, Hen derided herself, was what she got for toeing that velvet stage curtain, wondering if anything else lay beyond. Well, she’d found out, hadn’t she? She thumbed her ignominious note into her tablet, brusquely checked the patient’s vitals, and slunk out of the room. Behind her, she could hear the sibilant static of Dr. Nassur and the nurses frenetically rise.

They made her wait, standing straight-backed and ready with her syringes and her mask at the head of the next patient’s bed. This one was a regular, a frequent flyer, eyes bulging as she turned her unkempt head with slow, unceasing confusion. Hen sourly warned herself if she wasn’t more careful, she’d end up no different. 

Dr. Nassur and the nurses finally trudged in, trading dark glances. Hen kept her head down and let the steadying stupor of thoughtless execution set in. She really ought to be grateful for a job she could do well, for the stability of a paycheck and the safety of the tried and true. How insouciant, how proud she was to want constantly more, how gluttonous she was! Why should she be privy to visions of jinns?

Three patients had grimaced and bitten down on their silicone bite blocks when the second nurse rushed into the room. 

“He’s gone!” she blurted, her face exactly what Hen would expect on a sitcom. NURSE RUSHES IN, SURPRISED.

“Who’s gone?” Dr. Nassur snapped.

“The first patient! The one Dr. Hen—the one we canceled. I opened the curtain when transport came, and the bed was empty.”

“A catatonic patient just got up and walked out?” From Dr. Nassur’s lack of inflection, they all knew it was not really a question. “A patient whose muscles atrophied by months of being bedbound somehow heaved himself over the siderail of his bed and absconded, is that what you’re telling me?”

The nurse shook her head helplessly. “He’s…just not there, Doctor. I can’t explain it.”

But you can, can’t you?

Hen felt her insides slacken and drop with the euphoria of validation. She saw him then, the man with the green eyes, floating just behind Dr. Nassur’s left shoulder. She knew he was floating because of how tall he was, and the way his little twisted beard bobbed like flotsam on the ocean. The din of audible voices grew muted as she felt her face stretch and lift. She closed her eyes and breathed in the irresistible smell she couldn’t place before. 

Lamb! It came to her, sudden as lightning. He smells like lamb.

She thought she heard the jinn laugh. She wondered if she would get three wishes.