Quote:
Winter Apples (10) : Whereas most trees have already lost their leaves and stand barren in the winter months, these trees are still a lively green and don't seem affected at all. The most interesting thing about these trees isn't their color--it's the sudden fruit that has appeared on them. A few days after the first snowfall, little apples began to grow--small, bright red. They range in size from berries to plums--but taste like the sweetest apple you've ever sampled. They're all over the city, and the harvest is bountiful; more appear after every snowfall.
There's just one catch--eat too many, or eat the wrong one--and you're out cold. Every apple risks drowsiness, fatigue, and even unconsciousness that can last for a few hours up to a day. If you're looking for a sweet treat and a good nap, you've come to the right place. Just make sure you're somewhere comfortable first.
There's just one catch--eat too many, or eat the wrong one--and you're out cold. Every apple risks drowsiness, fatigue, and even unconsciousness that can last for a few hours up to a day. If you're looking for a sweet treat and a good nap, you've come to the right place. Just make sure you're somewhere comfortable first.
Even though the sun had long since set, marking the start of the new holiday, and even though he, Tabitha, and Rhonda had been in the middle of a prayer when his phone had gone off with the alert reserved for texts from coworkers, Simon barely needed five minutes to get cleaned up and changed for a walk over to the hospital. Sighing heavily as he made his apologies to Sister, Sister-In-Law, and Benny (terribly confused by one of His People getting up to leave so unexpectedly), Simon pulled a winter coat on over his hoodie, sweats, and pair of festive plastic necklaces, one done in silver and one done in blue.
Amidst the more nondescript beads—the polyhedrons with so many sides that they were practically round—those strands sported beads shaped like menorahs, dreidels, and six-pointed magen Davids. But if Simon thought that he could make any kind of passive-aggressive point about what, exactly, his coworkers had pulled him away from? He also knew, or at least felt in his heart, that his point would, like as not, end up thoroughly missed. Fifteen brisk minutes and the cold air in his lungs did very little to soothe either his nerves or the flames of tension steadily building within him. Flames that wanted Simon to stop holding them back and let them rage about the unfairness of it all.
Hard as ******** diamonds to schedule enough staff on Christmas and Easter. Even the Jesus-lovers who only rarely thought about their prophet, much less attended their own worship services, would put in to take those days off if their could. Some were probably shameless enough to try and take a religious discrimination complaint to hospital higher-ups if they didn’t get their way about that, regardless of how long it had been since they’d shown their faces around any church. But of course, who was the first one to get paged for an unexpected shift when something happened to leave the ER with a dearth of people who could legally write prescriptions on this, the fourteenth of December, shortly after sunset?
The Jewish NP just trying to enjoy the first night of Hanukkah with his family, such as they were, these days.
Made Simon itch to stop off at the 7-11, get himself a pack of Marlboros, and light up to take the edge off before he clocked in.
But, as she’d proven several times over while making him quit, Tabitha had some kind of sixth sense, or enhanced ability to read her little brother’s tells, or <******** something that let her know when Simon backslid about staying off and away from tobacco and everything else inside the average cigarette. She’d kill him with disappointment if he came home later, broadcasting loud and clear for her that he’d gone back to one of the bad habits he’d picked up while dating Jason. Would’ve been nice for the squishy, apple-shaped stress ball in his pocket to help him any, but alas.
Arriving at the staff entrance for Destiny City Memorial’s emergency room, Simon found the whole process depressingly similar to how things worked at any other moment. Clock in. Hit the locker room. Clean up. Scrub up. Lanyard and employee ID around his neck because he didn’t trust the clips not to fall off his scrubs, given half an opportunity. When he emerged into the paths of rooms for ER guests, he looked around for the colleague who’d summoned him away from his family. In lieu of spotting Laverne, he made a beeline to the coffee station and the first colleague who wasn’t preoccupied with a patient, a chart, or anything else more serious than counting out her packets of fake sugar.
“Cassidy,” he said, not rudely but not exactly gently either, “have you seen Laverne? Or if you can’t point me to her, can you tell me what she needed me here so urgently for? I thought we were supposed to have Dr. Fox, Dr. Henry, and Dr. Auberjonois on staff tonight.”
“Yeah, the operative word there being supposed to.” Looking away from her coffee, Cassidy fixed Simon with A Look that strongly suggested she might smack him for pointing out that supposed to was technically two words. “That was before all of them became otherwise indisposed.”
Frowning, Simon nudged further: “How’d they manage that, exactly?”
“One of the same reasons that we’re swamped tonight.” A long sip of coffee interrupted the flow of information, but……honestly, fair enough, Simon thought. “We’ve got a few people with the annual ‘I got bitten by these weird rabbits and now my core temperature’s crashing’ complaint—”
“Well, they’ll need to get referred for hospital admission—”
“—we’ve got some people with injuries that look like bites and claw marks—”
“Anybody drawn straws on who gets to put in the call to animal control, yet?”
“Yeah, we’ve got Craig on it.” But Cassidy shook her head in a way that indicated more, deeper exhaustion than seemed right for things that, while concerning and dangerous, sounded like more of the same that they usually saw in the ER. “Then, there’s all the folks who are passed out and won’t wake up, and they’re—”
“Excuse me, what?” Simon met his colleague’s unimpressed expression with folded arms and an arched eyebrow. “What, did someone set a bunch of infected tsetse flies loose in Destiny City?”
Dimly, he wondered if Jaidev would know anything about that. If it had happened, would it be in his people’s wheelhouse, the people he was trying to get away from? Was releasing a plague of trypanosomiasis on Destiny City something they would’ve done? If it were, then Destiny City was probably in for the long haul, if not outright ********. Depending on the strain, sleeping sickness might’ve taken a year or more to progress as far as unconsciousness.
At least Cassidy shook her head again, so the ER was spared the need to fast-order bulk amounts of fexinidazole, pentamidine, and melarsoprol.
“It’s why Fox, Henry, and Doctor A are all out of commission.” Cassidy listed them off, counting on her fingers: “Brenda found Fox passed out on the break room table after he took his lunch; he’s been admitted. Henry’s wife had to call in for her, then brought her in; she’s been admitted, too. And Doctor A’s daughter was supposed to be doing exams at DCU? But a friend brought her in after she fainted in some park by the university library. So, he’s been excused from his shift. Laverne’s had a Hell of a time trying to find an M.D. doctor to fill in.”
“Makes sense.” Simon hated that it made sense. But……he hadn’t been the first person called, after all. That was something, he guessed. He’d been unfair to his colleagues, even if he’d kept it to himself. “At least nobody’s likely to need a script for marijuana or MDMA in the next several hours.”
“Don’t even say something like that,” Cassidy groused. “You’re gonna manifest somebody into needing them.”
“If that happens and we don’t have an M.D. available yet, we’ll just have to get them transferred over to DC Medical Center.” Not an ideal outcome in the mind of the hospital’s CEO, no doubt, but ******** it; patients’ needs were more important than money. With a sigh, Simon looked toward the front of the ER. As a consequence, he spotted Laverne. “Thanks for the run-down, Cassidy See you on the floor.”
