Sunday Blog 176 – 16th March 2025
This month I’m participating in the March Micro Marathon with Smokelong Quarterly, producing a piece of flash fiction and non-fiction each day. Simplistically put, flash is a piece of less than 1000 words. Like throwing pots, one after the other off the potter’s wheel. After this month is over, I’ll have a range of misshapen pots to re-work, with the feedback I’ve received. And then it will be time to remember that yet again, writing is re-writing.
But I thought I’d share one of the thrown pots today.
The prompt was to re-write an conversation you overheard from the perspective of the one of the people in the conversation. This was a something I heard through the curtain in a hospital ward.
Through the curtain
The young doctor shouts against my deafness, looks at her checklist and asks, do I want to resuscitate my wife? And I can only think, once I work out what she’s on about is, what kind of a question is that? She looks back at her clipboard and I figure that at the end of this conversation, she needs to have a goals of care plan for my Betty, but right now Betty’s asleep with a body full of tranquillisers and an egg on her head. Sixteen times she’s fallen since she was admitted to hospital a couple of weeks ago. Can it only be that recently? Up until then I swear she was just who she always was. My wife. My Betty. But in the madness and confusion of hospital, she doesn’t know who I am, who our son is. Where do we want to live? The doctor bellows. I want to live with Betty, but Betty can’t go home. The doctor’s very clear about that. My son has to go back home to Queensland. He’s very clear about that too. I want to be with Betty so there’s nothing else for it. I’ll have to follow her into an aged care prison, I tell the doctor. I’m not so clear about that, but what else is there to do? She makes another check on her list, wraps it up and moves on to the next bed.