"Did I disappoint you?

Did I let you down?

Did I stand on the shore

And watch you as you drowned?" — Assemblage 23

 

In the hospital room, Donna leaned against the edge of the sill. As the monitor beeped the slow metronome of failing life, her hand slid to her throat. There, hanging from a short chain, her fingers fretted with the platinum coin she could never bring herself to sell, even when her mother’s benders were at their worst, and money was lean. Her gray eyes trailed the shadow beneath the bed, the fluorescent arranging things into dull shapes and brittle seams of the minutes visible.

“You should rest,” the nurse suggested as she stepped into the room. With practiced efficiency, she checked the connections of tubes and wires feeding into and out of the frail body in the bed.

<<I am not resting,>> the Other murmured, slow and slippery beneath Donna's ribs, knitting itself to the rhythm of the drip. “I can’t,” Donna managed. <<The moment is near. I can feel it.>> She shook her head, her eyes trailing to the monitors by the bed and their catalog of her mother’s state.

“Would you like some coffee,” the nurse asked. “It’s terrible, but it’s strong.” Donna must have nodded, because the nurse smiled and disappeared into the hallway.

<<Your body is a ledger. I can make it balance.>> “Shut up,” Donna whispered. “For once just…shut up.” Reaching into her pocket she found the smooth plastic bottle and wrapped her hand around it. With a tap she heard the rattle within. «You don't want to do that, Flower. You don't want to not remember when it happens, do you?» Gritting her teeth, Donna slowly shook her head.

A metallic clatter and something rolled free from the shadows under the bed. As she bent, the space between her and the floor folded like a question, and for a sliver she thought she could refuse. The thought died on re-entry as realization struck and a small swell of panic took her. Her hand returned to her neck — the dangling chain — to find the coin gone. The frame hung half-open on its hinge in a way it shouldn’t. Fingers finding the clasp, she unhooked the chain and slid the frame free, gathering it in one hand, she plucked the coin from the tile. Gently her thumb caressed the coin in one short circle before she snapped the frame shut around it and slipped it back onto the chain, fastening it again.

<<I can make this easier. Call me.>>

Inhaling slowly, Donna counted the spaces between breaths and found a name hiding there, like the buzzing of an unseen insect in a dark room. Touching the coin again, she rubbed it and considered the arithmetic in refusal. “Fuck off,” she whispered. The medications weren’t helping anymore; they never did beyond the first weeks when a new one began. After a time, all they did was offer brief moments of respite, unless she took more than prescribed. But sometimes, that was the only way, no matter how people looked at her when she slurred or stumbled or nodded off.

The fluorescent hum of the ward tuned itself to grief. Donna stood with her back to the window, hand again jammed into the pocket of her thrift‑store pea coat, wrapped around the bottle. Inhaling, she smelled wool and mothballs and old cologne and she smiled; it smelled faintly of Basil, the middle-aged man who fixed the strip‑club lights. The only man who seemed disinterested, his concern genuine, his heavy bear-hugs not searching for more.

There was a strange, back of the throat clicking and her gaze drifted back to the bed. Her mother lay there, drawing short, wet breaths that sounded too small for even her frail body.

A nurse softened her voice at the door and crossed the room with a Styrofoam cup of black coffee. Donna’s gray eyes tracked the woman but she did not register lips moving.

“Are you sure you don’t want us to call anyone?” the nurse asked again.

Donna checked her hand, realizing she already held the cup. For a moment she’d forgotten taking it. Setting it on the sill, she shook her head. “It’s just me.” The monitor’s steady beeps filled the space. “It was…just us.”

The TV in the corner looped a weekend anchor’s smile above a slideshow of the Foundry in Bastion; a fox‑mask mural flashed and the voice came from another room. The nurse offered easy comforts — clergy, prayers, how strong she was being there alone — but Donna caught only fragments. She pushed tapered purple nails through her short black hair, fingers combing back, and let the words fall away.

She hadn’t come for this. She’d left Bastion for Pikesburg because her mother was failing again. <<You’re lying to yourself.>> The wrongways voice landed like a stone. Donna shook her head as if to knock it loose; the nurse had gone. <<You ran,>> the Other taunted.

She’d always heard it. Maybe that made her mad; maybe it did not matter anymore. The voice was not wrong: when her mother asked for money she had given herself instead. It was an exit. Bastion kept asking for parts of her she didn’t have left, so months before — when she turned eighteen — she ran; the club was a way to trade herself for rent, and the small steady wages that would not ask difficult questions. On that, she tried to manage things with her mother.

Poles was not a glamorous bar. It was the sort of club where the town’s backwardness collected like pocket lint — old men who remembered her mother on the floor years ago, grown sons who pointed and whispered. Still, it paid. Donna learned which faces to avoid and how to show nothing of herself on stage; she learned the weight of a grocery bag as a calendar. Her mother’s pills had been a ghost pressed between them for years. In a handful of months, care-taking had hollowed Donna into measures and schedules.

A convulsion made the oxygen machine whine higher. Donna watched with vacant eyes. She lifted the cup, blew on it, and sipped over the rim while staring. <<Put a pillow over her face.>> The Other whispered. Donna shook her head once more. <<You know you want it to end.>>

A memory slid in: bedtime stories in good months, her father’s soft line—“sometimes Mommy just has bad days, Flower. Daddy will take care of you.” A shiver ran down her arms as another convulsion shuddered across the bed.

<<It’s like a dog in pain. Put her down.>> She set the cup aside and stepped to the rail. Her fingers trembled as she pressed the back of her hand to her mother’s palm the way the woman used to press a coin to her own for luck. Her mother’s eyes fluttered open, then closed again. The sounds of the monitors around the bed eased into a slow, final rhythm before the abrasive alarms that meant nothing inside of her.

Donna had expected a storm of sorrow or rage and found neither; it was not a storm at all but a sealed window — opaque and windless. Outside, corridor noises rose and fell: a muffled phone, footsteps, someone laughing then clipping it off. No music from the club, no arguing — only the hospital’s indifferent hum.

Donna straightened the coat on her shoulders. The fox‑mask mural folded into the back of her eyelids like a face she might recognize later or never. She stood and listened to the machines screaming in ways she could not. Somewhere distant, people shouted and footfalls hurried closer. As she stood there, she marveled at the machines trying to do their job in he small grief of a room that kept going, whether anyone watched or not.