EPT
So I got my shit together and got a train to the hospital... I don't think I've ever been in a hospital before, or at least, not since I was too young to remember. I had to stop at the reception desk to ask where the Accident & Emergency was, and the woman there was this lovely old nurse who asked my name and gave me directions to the right building and told me to ask there, give them my name and who I was there to see - they'd help me from there.
From there I had to walk across the carpark, back in the direction of the accident and emergency place and despite being really rainy during rush hour (which I guess I thought would be the busy times for A&E) the whole place was dead still and quiet. I had my headphones in, but there was nothing playing. I guess I was too numb to reach into my pocket and actually put anything on. I can't even remember if I turned it off or if I'd just run out of album... I couldn't even feel seriously bad about my sister; a part of me was hoping this was all just some weird routine thing, and she'd be fine, but I guess I kind of knew from my dad's response that that couldn't be it.
I walked in the weird, folding-automatic doors they have, leaned on the front desk and told them my name and my sister's name. The nurse here was stern, looked a bit like a teacher I used to have when I was about 12; I guess when you're trying not to face up to something you notice these kinds of things. She gave me a look, and I realised I was soaking wet from my walk through the carpark, dripping water across admission forms and stuff on the front desk. So I stood up straight and asked again; she sighed and asked how to spell my name because it's in Irish and fucking unspellable (Mac an tSagairt, for the curious). I rattled out the spelling, feeling a bit better I suppose, because this happens all the fucking time, and she said they hadn't anyone by that name. I was relieved, until it occurred to me that she just hadn't changed the gender for my sister's name, so I asked, "Can you check for Nic an tSagairt?"
Sure enough, that flagged the sister's name, room number and some other details on whatever weird OS it is that hospitals use... again, these are the things you focus on in weird situations. I had to go up four floors, no sign of a lift any time soon, so I took the stairs... anything to put it off. Eventually, without being introduced to a doctor at all, I reached the right floor, checked the walls for the coloured strip that leads to Ward C and then follow the yellow line on the wall. I walked for what seemed like ages, passing on my left room after room of single beds, old people convalescing, seeming well enough, some asleep. On my right, huge open windows, looking across a field to a wood and the ruins of an older hospital, burned or knocked down, maybe both. Wind whips the rain against the windows and the fluorescent tube lighting casts shafts of white out into the rain.
I stopped noticing all of this when I saw my dad, leaned over a bed with something vaguely approximating my sister in it. It's like when you see someone you know from really far away and you know you'll talk to the, so you look away... break eye contact somehow. So I look at the floor until I get there, don't make eye contact with the father. It's clear he'd been crying, and I figured he really didn't need anyone drawing attention to it.
A doctor walked over and asked if I was related. He reamed off some details about her being hit by a jeep, dragged along the ground on her front - not much they can do for her but hold her together and hope. But I couldn't pay attention to him, I'm stuck focusing on my sister. One half of her face had been scraped clean of skin; her whole right cheek had been torn open and I could see eye lolling, to one side in its socket, sad and completely empty. Through the hole torn in her cheek I can see her teeth, right back to the molars, sharp and a little yellow, the bits of the person we never get to see.
She started to move, to open her mouth a bit, dreaming I supposed, and I wondered while her mouth worked, are everyone's molars so sharp? I mean, how often do you ever really see them? As I watched, she started to shrug at the blanket, like maybe she couldn't breath properly, or it was too tight. I leaned over to try and loosen it a bit, when I noticed that she was wide awake, big black eyes looking right up at me... lips pulled back, teeth exposed, her mouth all vicious and cruel.
I looked up at my dad, crying and scratching at his snout. I spun, looking to the doctor for help, and realised that yeah, fuck, he was a fucking bear too. All of them, the two people I'd loved the most and the only person I could have ever hoped might help me... they were all fucking bears. There was nothing I could do.
I turned and ran, I ran from my dad, from the doctors, from the nurses... I ran and ran. I ran until my paws hurt and the cold air burned in my snout. I ran across the carpark, with the rain clinging to my winter coat. I ran... I ran from the realisation that I too, was a bear.
