The Good Will Be Saved

Short science fiction story

11 January, 2043

You stare up at the ceiling and strum your tongue against your teeth while they do it. There is always something to count, something to watch, something to see in that hot white bloom of the hospital light. Anything to distract you from the proximity of touch from a stranger, those blue plastic gloves that left an acrid taste on your tongue, that hard thumb on your jaw and the grip of a nail into your cupid’s bow. Then that searing, hard pain of wire on bone that no anaesthetic could quell. Lie still, don’t move, and look up. Whatever you do, look up. Stare at the bright clinical nothing and calm the fire in your lungs that begs you to scream. Then, if the threads of the universe were merciful, it was over. And you were back there.

This year, there was a spider. It swung from the lamp and grazed its legs against the beam. It was free, ignorant of the folly of man and the traps and cages we constructed from nothing in the name of pleasure. I watched it, a voyeur of a lost world, this real world, tangible and broken and cracked and split. A world with dust and chalk and flaking paint, a world where light was too strong and the darkness too hard. A world with sloping flesh and brittle bone, a world where pain came unwanted and age haunted your spine and reminded you that here, you too shall…