Which tells me we’re doing something right.
Minutes – or hours – later, pain spikes suddenly in my ribs, sharp enough to steal breath. I gasp despite myself, fingers digging into my thigh.
Snow’s head snaps toward me instantly. I shake my head once. Not yet.
The pain settles into a deep, grinding ache. I catalogue it automatically. Stress fracture worsening. Without fuel, bone resorption outpaces repair. I’m on borrowed time.
I feel a flicker of something I don’t like. Not fear of pain. Fear of becoming a liability.
That’s when I understand the real shape of this punishment. They’re not trying to break us. They’re trying to make us choose who to carry.
I lean back against the bench, breathing shallow, eyes on the floor.
If it comes to it – if food or water is offered in exchange for compliance, for violence, for betrayal?—
I already know what my body can afford. And what it can’t. I just don’t know yetwhoI’d be costing.
And that uncertainty hurts more than any fracture ever has.
ATOMISED MAN HAS A WAY OF SETTLING INTO PORES
You’ve Created A Monster - Bhones
Kookaburra
They make me shower twice.
Not because I’m dirty – well, I am; something about atomised man has a way of settling into pores – but because cleansing is ritual and ritual is control.
Places like this don’t call the police; everyone here signed the kind of contracts that make accidents disappear.
The water is too hot. The tile is the kind that pretends it’s clean even when it’s holding on to a memory of blood. I scrub until my skin squeaks and the doctor says, “That’s enough,” like she means it. She doesn’t. Nobody means anything here unless I make them.
They take the clothes. They take the shoes. They take the hair tie that was not regulation but looked harmless enough for threedays. They return me to my room in a soft uniform the colour of institutional forgiveness and leave the door open because I’m not a prisoner.
Doctor Callaway waits in the chair by the window, clipboard balanced on one knee, spine straight enough to be a threat. There’s a single red dot on the collar of her blouse. She hasn’t noticed. Or she’s decided not to.
“Sit,” she says.
“On you?” I ask, sweet as syrup.
She doesn’t bite. “How are you feeling?”
“Hungry.”
“For food?”
“For a cigarette. For a walk. For the look on your face when you realised you weren’t going to stop me.” I smile at the memory. “That one. That look there.”
“Do you understand that what happened today constitutes an incident?”
“Do you understand that what happened today constitutes an outcome?” I fold myself onto the edge of the bed and tuck my feet under me like a well-behaved cobra. The mattress gives up a little sigh. “He put his hands on a patient. Twice. You’re welcome.”
Her pen hovers, then moves. She writes something I don’t try to read. I don’t need to. I already know the gist:impulse control poor; charm intact; culpability diffuse; staff training inadequate; oversight required; my career a fragile vase balanced on the edge of a piano in an earthquake.Poor dear. She hates the vase.
“We’ll be conducting an internal review,” she says.
“You’ll be conducting a very thorough cover-up,” I correct. “Orderly slips on wet ground, meets industrial equipment. Tragic. The wood chipper gets a new safety guard. You get a headache. I get a shower.”
