Flash Fiction: Teeth in the Fog

1 - The Merchant

Supply and demand. The fog has been great for business because . . . supply and demand. Before, a man trying to make a living at the square had a market bloated with glitter and frivolity.

Food couldn't be just food, it had to be nurtured in the cleanest of farms, the animals serenaded by the sweetest of virgins every morning. A coat couldn't just shield a body from the cold, it had to be the perfect cut and color so the body looked slimmer, younger, richer. And the brands . . . no one of consequence would use anything that didn't bear a proper insignia.

The fog purified the system to its simplest form. Food, never mind its history, helped your hollow ache in your belly. The coat was a barrier between your skin and the teeth in the air. Younger people don't seem much significance in a brand anymore; they sort through piles of hand-me-downs for something that fits them without a thought for letters, prints, or stripes.

2 - The Parent

Not smart to have kids no more, so of course people want more. It gets lonely in the dark--lonely, cold, and dangerous. You have a kid because even if the teeth don't get you, hunger and sickness will hobble your back and squash your lungs. Maybe your kid will go hunt for you then, though the odds for that aren't good.

It's a bad investment either way. Kids die more often than not, their little noses clog with the sooty leftover of oily scales and fragments of insect limbs. A sleek, hunter dog would be a better bet. They don't need more than crumbling concrete, empty pipes, and what little meat you can't scrape off the bones of things they kill for you.

People keep trying for kids anyway. There's some instincts the fog can't kill.

3 - The Technician

They write in a language that once ruled the world. The commands flowed through a contained logic born from the abstract envisionings of a class of people with no skills to fight the fog. Their poems now live in sheets of paper dyed black with soot, the words painted in white wrung from the bellies of vanquished teeth.

Eventually, disciples will string together commands without understanding what they mean. The old technicians can't explain their meaning without their old tools any more than they could teach what 'sunny' means to someone blind from birth.

Or after the fog.

4 - The Hunter

There's a craft to growing old in the fog.

Without the comforts from before, no one can get much mileage out of a human body. Bones don't get as strong as the once did, a person's reach remains stunted, and deep restful sleep is suicidal when no one can predict when the wind will take a nasty turn. There isn't a human left that never huddles under their bed as storms slam teeth against their windows, teeth hitting glass, wood, cloth, or cardboard. Only the mournful rumbling of a hungry belly is worse.

It's easier, for the belly at least, to be alone. It takes hours of patience and focus to kill a single, skinny, rabid deer scurrying from building to building, obscured in the smog. The loneliness that eats at your every thought is an ally every time you don't have to hand over a piece of game, longing for every strip of stringy muscle you'll not rip off the twiggy bones.

5 - The Child

Orphans scurry from tower to tower, eyes glued to the ground for scraps. They fear the fog, but not as much as they trust their ears and noses. They're the ones that stay out longest when the bell signaling incoming storms ring, then come fastest when the wind subsides.

So they're the ones who find the carcasses left behind by the smog, and they're the ones who dig appreciate how the teeth in the fog have stripped away the skin and cooked the meat. They might look feral to those who retain the sensitivities of days past.

But they're not. They've just never seen the sun.  

Flash fiction: Paralysis

Autumn arrives early at Camp Lakehill. The tree leaves seem sadder, like they shrink in on themselves a little bit every night. It smells differently too, or maybe Lucinda’s nose doesn’t work quite the same way in the cold.

Lucinda has been reading an ecology blog and knows the leaves fall away in the cold because the trunk and roots go to sleep, and the sunlight is not intense enough that it’s worth it for the tree to keep them alive, but she aches for the dying leaves anyway. If she could, she’d gather the trees in her thin arms and share her warmth.

Not that she has much warmth to share. None of the girls at camp do. They’ve been pairing up at night and huddling together in their narrow bunks beds. Lucinda’s bed partner is Maria Gomez, another girl between ten and eleven.

Maria’s bigger than Lucinda. Her mom has said that Maria blossomed earlier than expected. Last school year, she shot up almost a foot and her thighs, arms, hips, and chest filled out nice and soft. Lucinda thinks Maria is getting the short end of the deal in their partnership. She doesn’t think her body is large enough to offer Maria much comfort.

Maria spoons her most nights. Lucinda burrows in, her head just under Maria’s chin, her back pressed to Maria’s chest, the back of her thighs cradled by Maria’s hips, and two thin white blankets covering them both. It’s nice in an odd way. At night, Lucinda’s back is warmer than her front. And the familiar, lilac-soap scent of Maria’s skin chases the stink of a dying forest away from Lucinda’s nostrils.

Lucinda’s not sure if she’s asleep when Maria lays a hand over her mouth. She thinks Maria must have dozed off, otherwise her hand would be nowhere near Lucinda’s face. When Lucinda opens her mouth, her neck tensing to nudge Maria’s hand away, Maria slips two fingers inside. They taste like the twigs in the wet forest floor smell like.

It’s too strange to be scary. Maria somehow spreads her hand inside Lucinda’s mouth, one fat finger inside each of her cheeks and another holding her tongue down so the tip presses against her bottom teeth. It doesn’t hurt but Lucinda thinks it should.

A noise too strangled to be a proper scream gets stuck somewhere in Lucinda’s chest.

Lucinda’s heart starts rustling, a crackle reminiscent of the sound dried leaves make when cold wind passes through thin branches coming out her nose. She would cry, but her eyes are as dry as her throat is silent. She would struggle, or maybe just squirm, but her limbs feel as heavy and dead as granite. Her chest expands with every breath she takes, but she still swears she’s drowning.

It takes Lucinda hours to pull away from Maria. The hand is out of her mouth, but Lucinda struggles with the weight of dead meat on her tongue. She thinks she should scream, shake Maria’s shoulder, maybe hit her like an upset boy might punch a friend who played a bad joke on him.

At least, she should escape the narrow bunk bed.

Maria is back on her before Lucinda can make a decision. Except it can’t be Maria because the leg that falls over her hips is that of a grown woman, and Maria’s still a kid even if she’s grown rounder. The leg morphs into a tree and Maria wants to scratch her thigh as she does when she dozes in the forest ground and wake up with twigs and branches rubbing the skin of her calves.

A keen wail, something a dog might let out before a pack of hyenas, escapes Lucinda’s lips before there’s a big hand back in her mouth. It spreads its fingers again, so wide that Lucinda is disturbed when her jaw doesn’t ache. She’s stuck under the weight, her limbs as hollow and immobile as rusty pipes.

She doesn’t know how she stays under the massive tree-woman, terrified that her chest will stop expanding and letting in air. Maybe she squirms out from under it, but it doesn’t matter because she’s back under the warm boulder in seconds.

“Lucinda, come on!” It’s Maria that shakes her. “We’re gonna be late.”

The light, the words, or the hand on her shoulder; something makes Lucinda’s synapses blink, and her mind and body are awake, struck by a thunderbolt.

Though Lucinda feels like a storm swept through her, it must be a quiet affair. Maria’s warm brown eyes do not focus on her and instead frown at the tangle of sheets by their entwined legs.

“Last day at camp,” Maria mutters to herself. “Better make the best of it.”

Flash Fiction: Foreclosure

Wreck

The bank will have to claw every last penny out of my bitterness.

I take a sledgehammer to every wall that’s not facing the outside. I wrench out as many pipes as I can. The wall jacks I rip out with my bare hands. I hammer away at the kitchen sink, the one I renovated last year as the mortgage payments seemed to get steeper and steeper. Cement is cheap. I pour it down the bathroom drain, down the toilet, spill it all over the floors.

Putrefy

Meat stinks faster in the summer. I spend the five hundred dollars I have left on chicken, ribs, pork, veal, meat, meat, and more meat. They cut off my electricity a week ago, so it might be just as well to leave it all in the fridge.

But not as effective.

I stuff pieces into every nook and cranny I can find in every room in the house, inside the wall jacks I took out, into the holes I made in the walls. The rest I leave in the fridge, hoping for a fungal universe to flourish.

Decorate

On the one wall I spared, the wall in front of the bed I shared with my husband until a year ago, I use the last of my colors. I don’t have the time to create the kind of image that would end up in a museum, but I’ve got more zest now than I’ve had in years. I paint a dying sun, a flame collapsing in on itself and absorbing an entire world.  

Clean

Appearances are important.

The lawn has not been mowed in months, and that’s no way to greet important people. The flowers have all dried out, but the brown foliage remains. I uproot the weeds, clean the dirt stuck to the wall behind the small patch of flowers. If I had enough money left, I’d have bought a new coat of paint.

Shock

I thought long and hard about how to set this up just right. A gun would’ve been faster, probably painless, but the neighbors might have heard. Can’t have the police here before the bank, so it’s gonna have to be the rope. The living room’s ceiling fan lines up nice with the front door so if I play it right, my corpse will be the first thing the bastards see.

Hope my neck breaks instantly.

Flash Fiction: Magic Fever

Suburbian Cheerleaders Attack Magic Fever Patient and Drink His Blood; A Deadly Fad Diet.

Marie had to read the blog’s title twice before she grasped the words, and two more times before she understood it. She glared at her phone, then closed the window and went to check CNN.

There it was. Suburbian Cheerleaders Attack Magic Fever Patient and Drink His Blood; A Deadly Fad Diet.

Marie skimmed the article.

Skinny girls hear that AHDS patients never gain weight. They kidnap a twelve-year-old boy from the projects, starve him because they read that AHDS patients are most infective when they’re stressed out, cut his neck open a few times, and drink him down as best they can. They get sick, convulse, then die, and the kid “recovers” in a psych ward.

“It’s a tragedy,” the article quoted one of the skinny girls teachers, “they were such bright, promising young women. Things like these wouldn’t happen if we didn’t push such unrealistic standards of beauty on our young girls.”

“Come on, you’re next.” Sho’s annoyed voice startled Marie away from her phone screen. “I don’t wanna be late to class again.”  

Marie shuffled to the nurse’s office, swallowing a comment about Sho knowing more math than their teacher anyway. It was hardly an insult. Another girl in their class once asked him if Virus X made him smart. 

“I was smart before I was sick,” Sho had told her, dark eyes not moving from his textbook, silencing the nasty giggles around them.

The school’s pale green hallways seemed narrower than ever as Marie navigated through her day, trying to strike a balance between looking down at her shoes like a mouse and glaring at everyone around her. Her eyes met their head cheerleader’s at the end of the day, and the striking blue gaze forced Marie to remember a picture of the young black boy who’d been tortured for days by cheerleaders worried that they were getting too heavy for the top of the pyramid. His sunken cheeks and hooded eyes had glared from the bottom of the article, right after the cheerleaders' teachers lamented about her bright student’s wasted life. 

Marie looked away from the head cheerleader and stepped out into the hot city summer. Her family had moved to the city a month after Marie was officially diagnosed with AHDS. She hated it. The cement streets absorbed sunlight and then spat it back up, until Marie felt like she was inside a pressure cooker. Trees were few and far in between, trapping the smog in the air that Marie had no choice but to inhale, though not breathing wouldn’t kill her permanently. The first few weeks, she’d cleaned huge, black boogers out of her nostrils every single night. Her sister Sarah, who didn’t have Virus X’s sentinels in her blood, got one of her eyelash follicles infected and clogged up. She needed a month’s worth of eyedrops.  

“Everyone was talking about those cheerleaders at school,” said Sarah that night. They shared a room because their dad couldn’t afford a big house in the city.

“Marie?”

“They’re dead,” she said. “At least they won’t get fat.”

Stupid girls they’d been, no matter what their teacher said. Out of 100,000 people infected with Virus X, 99,000 didn’t survive the first twenty-four hours. Of the remaining ten-thousand, nine-thousand didn’t survive the next twenty-four hours. Of the last thousand, nine hundred cleared the virus and became immune for life. And the last hundred . . . the last hundred never got fat, and maybe those were good enough odds for some people.

If Marie had been given a choice, she’d have risked getting fat.

Next day was the same as always. She got in line for her pills in front of the nurse's office, and she even remembered to stand behind Sho to avoid annoying him. Her classes were a daze, as usual, and the cafeteria food was staler than normal. Marie didn’t technically need food to taste good anymore, but there weren’t that many AHDS kids at her school. Did no one care about the healthy kids shoving grainy pizza down their throats?

Marie liked the small bathroom hidden behind the janitor’s lounge a few feet away from the cafeteria’s back entrance. Though it tended to get dusty, it never got stained by pee droplets from girls who were too afraid to sit on public toilet seats. The water at the sink never got warm, but it wasn’t like the cold could hurt Marie anymore.

A knife could, but only for a moment.

A moment was all the head cheerleader needed.

When Marie turned away from the sink, flapping her hands to help dry them, an arm slashed at her chest. Marie gasped, a scream trapped in her throat, and reached for her chest as she stumbled backwards. Sticky blood touched the pads of her wet fingers before she felt a brief flash of dull pain, then her skin started knitting close. 

Marie wiped her bloody hand on the white sink, gagging as though a little cut could hurt her. The sight of blood had always made her dizzy, and Virus X hadn’t cured her of that.

The cheerleader made a strange noise, forcing Marie to remember where the real danger was. She looked up, then stopped breathing when she caught the cheerleader’s hungry stare. The girl’s blue eyes, perfectly outlined by kohl, widened before she brought the stained knife up to her lip gloss-shiny lips. Marie tasted vile when the cheerleader’s tongue wiped her blood from the knife.

The cheerleader dropped the knife on the floor and whirled around, flying out of the bathroom like there were hyenas on her heel.

Marie stared at the knife, then at the mirror over the sink. A red stripe had bloomed in the center of her chest, highlighting how small her breasts were. The cheerleader’s looked bigger, so she wouldn’t have to worry about looking like a kid forever on the very slim possibility she caught Virus X, survived, and then became a vamp.

Marie zipped up her sweater and went about her day.

~~~

This is another of my very early stories. The theme of a magic disease plays a big part in the novel I'm working on now, though it's completely different than what I imagined here.

Flash fiction - Polka Dot Legs

This is one of my earliest short pieces, very loosely inspired by a disease I had when I was young. Dengue. There won't be many similarities between the symptoms/treatments in that wiki article and what I very briefly describe here. I let my fantasies get the better of me. 

The mosquito I describe is based on the Aedes aegypti. I can't find a picture of more than one, but I remember them making pretty polka dot spider webs.

A handful of billion years after the universe began, a bloody plague harrowed a sunny island floating in the Atlantic. Though the little island’s inhabitants feared it was the end of times, the plague was more of a sneeze in the grand scheme of things. Only one hundred and nine people died. It didn’t even affect the entire island; just a slice of the northern half, and only because the climate there was perfect for the tiny Ilydes mosquito.

Only a little girl with wavy brown hair and long legs grasped how little the fever mattered. Her family called her Iadis, mostly when they were trying to find out where she was, though they generally preferred her far away. While Iadis’ neighbors despaired over funeral plans, she prayed for the summer to end so she could go back to walking barefoot without burning the soles of her feet. The ground got too hot in the summer during early afternoons.

It was the sun’s fault that Iadis found a Ilydes nest, though it was certainly Iadis’ fault that she got sick. Her aunt Ida, a harried, stout woman who didn’t have time for orphans in the first place, had warned Iadis to run away from mosquitoes and to wear the bug repellent that the city people had brought to their village.

But Iadis hated to be sticky, so she refused to wear the bug repellent and wandered all over the farm in sleeveless shirts and a short skirt. While burrowing into shade to protect her bare soles, she found the Ilydes nest.

Ilydes mosquitoes liked it moist and hot, so they clustered at the trunks of large trees after rainy days to drink from the soaked bark. They were flimsy, like all mosquitoes, but their legs were long and decorated with black and white polka dots. While feeding, they stood close together and made the prettiest, spiderweb-like sheet.

Iadis hated spiders. There was a pregnant one living in a corner of the tiny room she shared with her younger brother. Every night Iadis stared at the fat, white egg under its belly, terrified that it would eat her, but envying its gorgeous, shiny web. The spider knew better than to pick a fight with a human, of course, but it did envy Iadis’ long hair. Rather, it envied the individual strands because they looked tougher than any spider web she would ever produce.

Harmless, pregnant spiders tortured Iadis every evening, but pretty mosquitoes carrying a fatal disease didn’t faze her. She reached out for the web, thinking that it would look so nice blanketing her forearm. One, or perhaps several of the mosquitoes bit her. 

Though she’d been the one to disturb them, Iadis wiped them off her skin, killing several in the process. She glared at the polka-dot web, considered destroying it in a fit of spite, but settled for going on her way with an indignant huff.

Iadis went about her habits, skipping the day away and chasing cats, without a care in the world. One of her cousins was vomiting blood in the clinic a few miles south of the family farm, but he always pulled Iadis’ hair and tried to steal her food. She wasn’t worried about him.

(He only pulled Iadis’ hair because she kept laughing when another cousin of theirs called him Clucker-Chicken just because he was too afraid to go to the latrine alone at night, but Iadis would never grasp why that would bother him. As for the food, there just wasn’t enough of it sometimes, and Iadis wasn’t the type to curb her appetite.)

Iadis wasn’t bothered until the next night, when she didn’t manage to finish her dinner. She gave most of it to her little brother, who she liked best in their family because he was hers. Iadan had many cousins, aunts, uncles, and four different grandparents, but he only had one sister just like Iadis only had one brother.

Unlike Iadis, Iadan didn’t think that was so special, but he did like being the only one Iadis shared food with. She was the best tree climber of them all, and could get the juiciest fruit in the tallest trees.

The second morning after Iadis disturbed the Ylides nest, she couldn't get out of bed. Her world was spinning to the right while her head spun to the left. Iadan was cuddled on her back, as was his habit, and every time he shifted on their shared bed, Iadis wanted to barf. She would have pushed him away, but just the thought of moving made her want to cry.

Iadan was used to his sister’s finicky moods, so he got out bed without bothering her and joined their cousins games. Only when the sun was in the middle of the sky, the time Iadis liked to go fruit hunting, did he remember to go check on her. 

He found her on the edge of their lumpy bed, her head hanging a bit off and a pool of coagulating blood on the floor. Iadan almost screamed, then ran for one of their aunts.

Iadis’ aunt did her best to clean her up, then sent one of the older kids to the one house on the village with a phone to call her husband at his factory job. Without a message, he might not know to drive straight home after work to take Iadis to the clinic.

Though Iadis was far from the nicest kid at the clinic, she was the prettiest, and all the bleeding left her too weak to be nasty. The nurses doted on her, kept her thick hair clean of blood, and always knew when she stopped breathing. They never left her without fluids and when it looked like she’d thrown up too much blood, they convinced the doctor to test her cute little brother’s blood type. 

Iadis and Iadan were a perfect match.

Iadan didn’t care about needles, but unlike his sister, he’d been paying attention to all the people dying in the village. They all died because the mosquitoes sucked their blood, and suddenly a bunch of adults he’d never seen wanted to take his and give it to Iadis. 

Luckily for Iadis, her little brother was afraid to say no to adults, so he stuck out his arms and cried into their aunt’s skirt even though he only felt a little pinch when they stuck the needle in.

With Iadan’s blood, Iadis recovered in a matter of days. The nurses enjoyed a morale boost when they found Iadis cuddled with Iadan the night before they were both sent home.

A week after coming home, Iadis ran into another Ylides nest on the same tree bark. The polka dot web attracted her attention once more, and she crouched to take a closer look. At least, she knew better than to physically reach out for it.

Flash fiction - Central Pallor

This is one of my first attempts at creative writing. At the time, I was studying and sketching red blood cells. I had some great critiques for this short piece, but I seem to have lost them. This work is thus posted in its unedited glory.

Bones do more than give humans shape. They create the substance keeping their soft, fragile bodies alive. Among the components of their legendary blood is the humble red cell, cannibalizing itself almost from its conception so it can deliver oxygen and pick up waste. Bone marrow packages the proteins, iron, and vitamins needed to push them out into the blood vessels, sparing energy only to give them extra skin. Their nucleus (the closest thing a cell has to a mind), the marrow takes from them before sending them out into the world.

Soon, the red cells rid themselves of as most luggage as possible to survive. All fancy proteins most go, until there isn’t enough of the red cells left to fill up their skin. It’s for the best. They’ll need to squeeze themselves into sleeker and sleeker cords if they want to sneak into the thinnest slits in the human body.

The first time they reach the lungs, instinct forces them to gorge themselves with oxygen as quickly as possible. They cannot learn to work without the drive of a starving man at a steakhouse, so when humans run and their hearts pump faster, and pressure pushes the red cells through the lungs quicker, they still come out the other side replete with their prize.

To the rest of the body they go, and when they reach spots burning with acid, something they do not understand jerks their oxygen away from them. They pick up fire, praying the pressure that delivered them to their thieves will take them back to the lungs. There, they bathe in oxygen and lose the burn.

The cycle goes on. Pressure forces the red cells through the body’s close circuit of vessels, mindless of the branching roads. The red cells are slammed against segmenting arteries, and pieces of their skin are sheared off.

And sheared off and sheared off, until they can no longer squeeze through thin slits.

Then comes the spleen. The red cell hunter.

In its pulp, the vessels get thinner and narrower, ending on a tight bend that only the younger, sleeker red cells can squeeze through. The older ones, worn down by impact after impact against blood vessel walls, get stuck.

Garbage men, also made by the clever bone marrow, finish them off.

Scavengers pick up their proteins and iron, the hands that grabbed their beloved oxygen, and take them back to the bone. There, the marrow uses the red cells’ remains to create a new red cell.

The cycle starts again.   

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.

Flash fiction: How To Demoralize Your ER Doctor in Ten Easy Steps

1. What you read online is true: if you say you have chest pain, someone in the ER will usher you right in for an ECG. So make sure to say your chest hurts! Bonus: use the words “pressure” and “crushing” to describe this pain.
2. After you’re through the door, sneak away to get a Coke from one of the bending machines.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, cooperate with the tech trying to get you that ECG for your chest pain.
4. Inhale some of that Coke while telling your doctor your chest pain has passed, and now your stomach hurts.
5. Say your pain is 100/10 as you play with your phone. We all understand nothing on this Earth could be worse than not knowing what all your Facebook friends are posting at all times.
6. If your doctor abruptly walks away from you while you mumble something about the runs, it wasn’t because the patient on the bed next to you started seizing. Threaten to sue her when she remembers to get back to you.
7. By this point, it should be clear that no one’s offering you anything for your pain. You need to take some initiative. Tell everyone you’re allergic to morphine, Advil, Tylenol, Tramadol, aspirin, and ibuprofen, but your doctor gave you some drug you don’t remember . . . the one that starts with a ‘D’, and it works just fine. Dilutid? Delucid? It goes in the vein.
8. Dilaudid! It was Dilaudid. Gosh, you’re so glad you managed to remember the name!
9. Throw your soda at the doctor when she refuses to give you some Dilaudid. Even if she dodges, which she probably will unless you’re at the tail end of her shift, you’ll still be sending a message.
10. Be calm and collected by the time the police arrives to relieve the orderlies you’ve been verbally abusing for the last ten minutes. 

(I'm doing shifts in the ER this month.)