The throb of the hospital's engines was so loud she experienced it as a touch rather than a noise. The thrust of each piston caused her teeth to vibrate as if thump-thump... thump-thump... thump-thump she was being slapped by a giant palm, over and over and over again, receiving an undeserved spanking that never ended.
Occasionally, things lightened, and then slowly darkened, and just as slowly lightened again. She supposed this was caused by the nurses glacially drifting by in their gloriously anachronistic uniforms: crisp, starched, white, floor-length gowns like the habits of novitiate nuns, topped with enormous, elaborately folded headdresses reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House.
Despite never touching thump-thump... thump-thump... thump-thump her, or indeed, acknowledging her existence in any way, Odelia found the presence of the nurses enormously comforting. The hospital was much like the Titanic, if instead of trying to evade jagged mountains of ice without, it had chosen to employ them as staff within. As staff, they were hopelessly slow and inefficient, but it was a relief to know the hazard they presented had been reduced from hull-slashing to poor service.
"Will I be getting better soon?" Odelia asked. "Or dying? Either is fine. I'm not picky. But I would like to be getting on with it."
Her words were inaudible, smothered by the incessant thrumming of the engine, but a nurse wafting past Odelia's bed paused and her dangling stethoscope's chest piece dropped down in front of Odelia's face.
The nurse did not attempt to use the stethoscope, but merely let it hang there, and Odelia shivered through several thump-thump... thump-thump... thump-thumps of the engine, before a thought occurred to her.
What if the nurse had noticed that she'd spoken and wanted her to try again, but this time into the stethoscope?
It would make perfect sense. After all, how else could a question possibly make itself heard in all this racket?
She opened her mouth to speak into thump-thump... thump-thump... thump-thump it, but the chest piece twitched, its fat round black body bristling with busy legs, and it clambered up out of range. Just like that, the opportunity was gone...
Of course, that was assuming the opportunity had ever been real in the first place. It was far more likely to have been wishful thinking or thump-thump... thump-thump...
THUMP
Odelia gasped.
She had time for only a single ineffectual swat at the mattress underneath her as she swooped uncontrollably toward the foot of the bed and shot clean off it, snapping into the air in the manner of a sheet, flat and fluttering, her flesh folding in heaps upon itself as it hit the concrete.
Astonished, she lay there in a quivering mound, struggling to breathe as the punishing noise of the ship engines slowed and quieted, within seconds reducing to something not only recognizable as mere sound, but one that was entirely bearable. Pleasant, even... so pleasant that maybe, just maybe, what she was hearing wasn't engine noises at all...
It sounded less like machinery working than the rhythmic swish of ocean waves rushing up and around the hull.
Had the ship struck something?
Oh dear God... What if they were going down? How could she get to a life boat when it was all she could do to draw a breath, let alone move?
Gritting her teeth, she strained to straighten herself out, and after a few moments she managed to topple her heap of folded flesh, unfurling it down the aisle between the...
YOU ARE READING
Tipping the Scales
ChickLitOdelia has spent most of her life so firmly under her brother's thumb that she might as well have been an insect trapped in a chunk of amber, but now, at long last, something is happening to her. Too bad it's not a nice, normal, something, like a '...
