wake

Some patients can’t be saved

Wrist deep in blood, cursing breaths, frantic and shaking hands, part of Luce already knows it’s over, gone, it’s done there is nothing more he can do, but even so he continues working hopelessly on his client. Incoherent mumblings fall into the air around him, can’t be gone, can’t be gone, blood is still flowing from the wound he was trying so hard to stitch.

but that burden’s not on you

Can’t be gone. Gone. No.

some patients can’t be saved

His fingers lost the needle ages ago but his hands still go through to motions of sewing what cannot be salvaged. Good doctors don’t let their patients die on the operating table, good doctors don’t tremble and shake and continue work on corpses bathed in dim and unflattering artificial light. Perhaps he was dead the moment he walked through the door clutching at impossible wounds to his abdomen, dripping blood on the cold and dingy cement floor like it was out of fashion.

but that burden’s not on you

But pre-wrapped and packaged to death’s front door or not the moment he stopped breathing was on Luce’s operating table and it was his wrists and hands that were covered in the blood that he couldn’t get back in fast enough. And even if this stranger’s recovery was not written in the stars his death certificate would be written in Luce’s script, messy, illegible, blood-stained scrawls of a failed doctor.

some patients can’t be saved