Flash fiction - Seven Deaths

One

The baby was born too soon, so soon it could barely be called a baby, and the thin skin over his ribs stretched almost translucent every time he tried to take a breath. His mother cried the only time she came to see him, then asked if the transparent skin that made up the corners of his nostrils hurt. He died without a name.

Two

She was going home from college on Mother’s Day when a drunk driver T-boned her on the driver’s side. She got three bags of fluid on the way to the hospital, then died in the operating room while an exhausted trauma surgeon tried to find the source of internal bleeding. Later, the forensic pathologist explained that it was a routine case of exsanguination into the pelvis.

Three

The man had some kind of tumor wrapped around his heart. Though he’d tried not to listen when the grey-haired doctor with hundreds of fancy words explained it to him, he knew they couldn’t operate because his trapped, agonized, strangulated heart wouldn’t be able to pump through the fog of general anesthesia. Every single one of his heartbeats was a diffuse stab trying to claw its way out of his chest, including his last.

Four

The woman chased down too many Tylenol with vodka shots, and it ate away her liver. Her mother brought her to the ED once she started hallucinating insects crawling all over her skin, biting and biting until they drew blood, and she bled inside and out while her mother tried to convince the transplant board that her her daughter wasn’t a drunk.

Five

The doctors were always saying he was about to die, and they were always wrong. It hurt to breathe, true; which was why he needed to get out of the hospital and blow someone for a little hit. Just one more . . . just one more. It was his last thought before the clot broke off his heart valve and got stuck in some important artery or other on the way to his brain.

Six

She was going her own way, and not neat and soft like the women in novels, or like the statistics on suicides said she should. She walked into the emergency room and said she was planning to kill herself, only pulling the gun out when they called for the bitch shrink in the crisis unit. They were the ones who said they couldn’t cure her brain tumor, so they would be the ones to clean her brains off the floor.

Seven

He was a ninety-year-old smoker with a mass eating out of his lung and a heart that barely pumped any blood, but his daughter loved him. She was with him in the ICU when the monitors got louder, and she yelled that she’d sue every last doctor in the hospital if they let her father die. No one paid much attention to her, but the ICU did what the ICU does, and the last time she saw her father, a kid in blue scrubs and a short white coat was suctioning lung pieces out of his mouth.