I heard about the raves on my first day in the coma ward.
Stephanie, the ward manager, gave me the tour. She was a tough-as-nails veteran whose tenure at the ward varied depending on who you asked.
I didn’t know this at the time, but Stephanie was not a joking person. I thought that she must have been in this instance. How could such things as coma ward raves exist?
She prefaced her explanation with a question. She never quite trusted that you belonged here, and always wanted to test you.
“What are the dangers of prolonged bed rest?”
“Erm, bed sores.”
She nodded, but looked angry.
“And? Come on, we haven’t got all day.”
“Muscle atrophy.”
Stephanie sighed.
“It can also be difficult to readjust to gravity when you’re beginning to walk again. Now, as you will know, most of these people will never recover from their comas. But for those who do, you would think that they’d want to be welcomed back into the world with a nice working pair of legs, wouldn’t you?”
She shook her head again, muttering something to herself.
“So every Friday, we have raves. Through the use of a highly experimental procedure involving stimulants, both electrical and pharmaceutical, and some brain manipulation, we get these folks up on their feet dancing around. Now, I can tell you, Susan, I’ve seen it all in this job. There is nothing quite as sinister as seeing a bunch of coma patients dancing around silently in the middle of the night. So we put some music on, have a few snacks and drinks, and make it into a sort of party. You’re going to have to be ready.
“Do you have any questions? No, excellent!”
There were many reasons I had chosen to work on the coma ward. Chief among them was a recent but persistent heart problem for which I was currently subjected to a series of experimental procedures, questionable treatments, and spurious medications. I had always dreamed of working in medicine. While I had imagined myself somewhere exciting like A&E, I felt that the low-stress peace of a coma ward would be perfect.
I also felt that there was some good I could do on the ward. As Stephanie pointed out, there were two ways to look at coma patients.
“Either you think that they can hear, see and feel nothing, and that you’re effectively looking after a bunch of living corpses. Or you think they are still here with us. If a woman comes in and holds her son’s hand, he can feel it. If a man comes in and reads to his wife from her favourite novels every night, she knows he is there and appreciates it. These people are still here with us even though they are asleep. By coming to visit them, you are doing a beautiful, altruistic, selfless service.
“I think that’s a load of bollocks. But it is not my business what others feel.”
I fell very much into the latter camp. I did think that these patients were here, and could hear us. I thought fondly of the future after they had woken up, when they would say that they recalled my voice from distant dreams.
The next day, I asked Samira about the raves.
“Oh, no, they’re totally real. I’m coming up to my fiftieth one soon, I think.”
“But do they even work? Surely they’re not medically possible.”
Samira beamed at me, the way you might do at a puppy.
“It’s so cute seeing a newbie—they always look so concerned. To be honest, I don’t really understand the science behind it. It’s a bit like ECT: no one really knows how it works, but for some people it does. You get someone who’s really severely depressed, whose head’s completely gone, and then you give them the neurological equivalent of smacking a staticky TV and they’re right as rain. I mean, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Maybe they shouldn’t work. All I know is that most Fridays I’m in my gladrags dancing the night away with a bunch of coma patients. It’s all run by Dr. M–.”
“Wait, Dr. M–? The Dr. M–? What would she be doing down here?”
“The thing is, she was sort of struck off a few years back. There’s a lot of debate about whether she is a maverick or if she’s just a complete lunatic We rarely ever see her, but whenever she comes down for the raves, she works wonders. They’re her baby.”
“But how can she be back working if she was struck off?”
“Numbers,” said Samira, shrugging. “With all the cuts, ageing population, understaffed hospitals, we can’t really be too picky. We can’t be turning people away just because they were linked to a few deaths.”
“She killed people?”
Samira burst out laughing.
“Oh no. No, no, she was linked to a few deaths, that’s all—you should look it up some time, fascinating story.
Samira’s demeanour changed to an unfamiliar seriousness.
“But look, I think that the raves are a really good thing. People out there couldn’t give a shit about coma patients. I mean, why do you think we’re down in this godforsaken basement? For all her faults, Dr. M– loves these patients. She will do anything for them. The jury’s still out on the raves, but it’s a different approach, isn’t it?
“Dr. M– really believes in them, and I have faith in her.”
The coma ward truly was located in a distant, godforsaken part of the hospital. It was only a slight exaggeration to say that the walk from my flat to the hospital was shorter than the walk from the main hospital to the coma ward. To reach it, you had to take a series of elevators and staircases, followed by a labyrinth of corridors where capricious lights shivered and flickered when they deigned to work at all. There was a persistent earthy smell, poorly masked by industrial strength detergent and cleaner—like a teenager bathing themselves in deodorant in lieu of a shower before a night out. Exposed pipes leaked, and naked wires emitted a charge that made you constantly feel as though insects had burrowed into your skin.
Other than the odd family member, nobody but us came down to the ward. On some nights, once visiting hours were over, it really felt like you were the last people alive on Earth. If the world did end above us, we would only know it once we emerged from our shift.
Over the course of my first week, I met more of the staff. There was Joseph. His plan had always been to move here to study medicine, but his mother had suffered a stroke and gone into a coma. After exhausting both modern and traditional forms of medicine, Joseph turned to God.
“It was not praying,” he explained to me. “I don’t believe in prayer. I don’t believe there is a God up there, and I certainly don’t believe that even if there was He would alter His entire plan for the world simply because I asked him to. But I was desperate. You will surprise yourself with what you’ll do when you’re desperate.”
Joseph had made a pact with God that if his mother did recover, he’d work with coma patients. When she did, he kept up his end of the bargain.
“I know it makes no sense,” he said, shrugging. “I still don’t believe in God, I don’t believe He helped my mother—I think saying He did is a lowkey insult to the doctors and nurses who actually brought her back. But I made a promise.”
I couldn’t quite square the contradiction. Rational or not, he stuck to his promise.
Min worked part-time. She was by far one of the most enthusiastic people I had ever met. She could be a bit much sometimes, as she never stopped talking, but for the most part she was ideal company on the long empty nights.
She was also firmly in the camp that the patients were ‘here’ in a significant sense. She would break off our conversations halfway through to go and talk with one of them or plump up their pillows. I would come back from lunch or breaks to hear her engaged in impassioned, one-sided conversations with them.
By the end of my first week, I was exhausted. It wasn’t just the hours, which were long, but the shifting nature of them. Although I was passionate, the work drained a lot of my enthusiasm. My first six days felt like a month.
My way of coping was to take perhaps a little bit more of my heart medication than I should have. I knew once I got used to everything I would be okay. I just needed them to get me through the first few weeks, until I got into the rhythm of everything.
Just before leaving for the day (night), I noticed Samira, Joseph, and Marek, the cleaner, bringing boxes into the ward.
“What’re they for?” I asked.
“We’re preparing for the rave,” Marek said.
I was not sure why Marek was called the cleaner. No one had ever actually seen him clean. The coma ward was always spotless.
As with Stephanie, stories of Marek abounded. Everything from being a Soviet nuclear physicist to some sort of mass murderer under an assumed identity was somewhat believable. While we never saw him cleaning, he would often do various manual jobs around the ward and the basement. Samira once told she was about to get Stephanie when one of the machines was not working. To her shock, Marek began tinkering. She was about to tell him to stop when he spoke to her calmly but firmly in his own language. Incredibly, the machine restarted.
The rave was only around forty-five minutes away. I would have liked to stay and watch, but really needed to get some sleep—no matter how little it would help.
“Don’t worry,” Marek assured me. “You’ll get your time.”
At around four o’clock one Wednesday morning, I heard a strangely familiar voice at the corner of the room, saying something I could not make out. I put down my book.
Voices in the ward could and did happen. Sometimes, if the conditions were right, they could carry from all the way up in the main hospital, until they could sound like whispers right by your ear. It was a sort of aural equivalent of a trick of the light. It could also be down to sleep deprivation. For all the health and safety protocols you had to undergo working in a hospital, it had never ceased to amaze me how dangerously low levels of sleep many medical professionals operated on.
Mrs. Mason was a woman in her fifties whose origin no one seemed to know. When I reached her bed, I could see that her eyes were wide open and her lips were moving silently. You can train and study as much as you like, prepare as much as you want, but you can only know if you are ready for decisive moments when they actually happen.
I was not.
“Joseph! Joseph!” I screamed, summoning him from the other room where he was doing electronic paperwork.
“What’s wrong?” he said, rushing in.
“It’s Mrs Mason, she’s—”
Joseph smiled at me kindly, and shook his head.
“It’s just a mirage,” he said.
“What?”
“She’s not awake. It happens to all of us.”
Whether to humour me or to be thorough, Joseph walked me through the various tests that confirmed Mrs Mason was indeed not awake.
“Look,” Joseph said, “you must always conduct the tests, because of course people do wake, and we are happy when they wake. But more often than not, they don’t wake. Not to worry. When it happens to you, it can be disturbing.”
Joseph turned around, and swept his arm across the whole room.
“This is a peaceful place. In many ways, it is a beautiful place. But it is also an unsettling place. Death is never far away. You will see things. You will hear things.One night I was here alone, reading a book, and I saw Mr. Matthews—he is no longer with us—walk right up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I could swear I was awake. I was not hallucinating. Mr. Matthews was there as sure as the fingers are on my hands. I can still feel his hand on my shoulder. But I also know it didn’t happen. That’s why we call them mirages. They are strong, but they do not exist.
“You’ll see a lot of things down here that don’t exist. You can’t let them get to you.”
As I settled into the rhythm of the coma ward, tiredness pervaded me, spreading from my body to my mind to my soul. It was an itch even sleep could not scratch. A constant, almost tinnital, insomniac buzz either exacerbated or was exacerbated by my heart condition. I had to resist the urge to take even more extra medicine. I could not truly enjoy days off. I was too tired.
But whenever I returned to the coma ward, I felt vindicated, and remembered why I was doing this. It was the strangest sensation.
“When I come here, it feels so peaceful,” I explained it to Marek. “It’s so quiet. But more than that, I feel safe here. I feel happy. It’s like I walk in here and all my tiredness and all my—”
I was about to mention my heart problems, but stopped myself.
“All my other problems go away.”
“It is as though you were always meant to be here,” said Marek.
“Yes,” I said, immediately. “Yes, exactly.”
“I don’t know what you plan to do with your life, but some people have been here for a long time, and some people will be here forever. Some people have been here for not so long. They are scared of it, or get tired of the loneliness. But I never feel that. I love it here.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I have always been here,” Marek said. “For as long as I can remember. I feel in this life that you have to care most about the forgotten. We talk about the cancers or the sick children, and that is good, but nobody talks about the comas. They are not interestinge. They do not,” he searched for the English idiom, “pull on the heartstrings. Yet wouldn’t you want people to talk about you if you were in a coma? Would you consider it nothing if it was happening to you?”
The answer ultimately came down to precisely what a coma state is. If there was indeed some consciousness, then I would very much care what happened to me; if there wasn’t, I wouldn’t. It’s like death in that sense. What else is death, after all, but the ultimate peace?
One Monday, I was called into a meeting with Stephanie.
“Typically with a new starter we like to ease them into the raves, but due to unforeseen circumstances with Min, we are going to have to get you in this week. This is okay with you.”
I wasn’t sure that I was ready, but nodded anyway. She had not intended it as a question.
“Fantastic. Now, I have been made aware that you have already experienced at least a couple of what we call coma mirages so far. As you can imagine, the chances of such a phenomenon happening during the rave are increased exponentially. Due to the pharmaceutical stimulants they are on, and the galvanic and neurological stimulation, the patients will be moving around and dancing. During such times, it will often look like they might be awake. Your background is in psychology, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t, but I was too scared to disagree, so I nodded.
“I have never much cared for psychology. What is the corollary to Broca’s Area?”
“Err…Wernicke’s?” I said.
Stephanie seemed unimpressed.
“As you will know, optical illusions are a very powerful and pervasive phenomenon. Even to this day, I can still be tricked into thinking that someone is awake. This happens even with Dr. M–. So it will almost certainly happen to you.”
“I must admit, I have been worried about this. What do—”
“Now, as well as to prevent muscle atrophy, the raves are also designed to try and coax people awake again. So while it is more likely that a patient’s seeming wakefulness is a mirage, they may also have, in fact, woken. Over the years, Dr. M– and her team have painstakingly gone through a foolproof and exhaustive process of trial-and-error to establish a test for whether a patient has in fact woken up during the rave. It is known as the ‘M– Method.’”
Stephanie reached into her desk and withdrew a pen and some paper. She spent the next minute or so writing numbers or symbols as well as letters. At one point, she stopped, thought for a long time, muttered something to herself, nodded, and then continued writing.
“If you see someone who you think might be awake,” she said, eventually, handing me the paper, “say this to them.”
Stephanie handed me the paper. On it was written:
ARE YOU AWAKE?
“‘Are you awake?’” I repeated.
“That’s it,” said Stephanie. “As part of the neural stimulation, some of the coma patients will appear to talk during the raves. Sometimes, they will mutter nonsense; sometimes, they will mutter proper words but ordered strangely; and then they will, as a sort of monkey-typewriter phenomenon, say words that are in the correct order and form a coherent and grammatically-correct sentence. Do not let this fool you.
“However, if you ask ‘are you awake’, that will do the trick. This is because one thing they should not be able to do is coherently answer a question at the moment it is asked. So by asking this question, and getting an expected answer back, you know that they have in fact woken. But, again, if you do hear them speak, do not let that in and of itself fool you into thinking they have awoken. Coma patients can be very devious, you need to remember that, very mischievous. Sometimes they can even get a little belligerent, at which point we might have to sedate them and put them back into bed.”
“Has one ever woken before?”
“Once,” said Stephanie wistfully. “However, the person died a day or so later from a heart attack. And their time was not pleasant. They were screaming constantly. It was either something they had seen when they were away, or they were seeing now that they were back. Dr M– was devastated, as you can understand. She’s never really been the same since. But we all live in hope.”
She then leaned forward, and spoke a little quieter.
“No matter how fruitless that hope may be.”
For the rest of the week, I thought about the rave.
“It is a strange experience,” Joseph said, “but once you’re in it, you’ll be fine.”
“And just remember,” Samira reminded me, “we’ll all be here with you, if anything happens.”
I was sure that was just a figure of speech, but it set off flares in my mind. What exactly could ‘happen’?
On the night of the rave, despite everyone’s reassurances, I was jittery and on edge. I was oscillating between a state of complete exhaustion and boundless energy. My heart was racing, and I took three of my pills, risking a little caffeine to counteract the drowsiness they engendered. I reassured myself by saying that it was only for one night.
When I arrived, the disco ball and DJ station were set up. All of the patients were out of their beds, although they had not begun dancing yet. Even though this is exactly what I had been expecting, the sight was deeply disconcerting. The lights in the room were dimmed. It was like the moment in the cinema just before the film starts. In the corner of the room, I saw a woman in her forties with one of the patients.
“Who’s that?” I asked Samira.
“Dr. M– ” she said.
“Oh, I’ll just go over and say ‘hello’” I said
“No,” said Samira, stopping me with her hand. “She’s busy at the moment. We sometimes call her Dr. Michaelangelo. You wouldn’t disturb him while he was sculpting. I’m sure she’ll come over and introduce herself later.”
In the meantime, we continued with the setup. All patients strictly had to be by the beds before the rave started. A patient I didn’t recognise was standing at the DJ station. I was about to lead him back to his bed, taking him gently by the arm, when he looked up at me. I jumped, and he grinned.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I’m Alan, the DJ.”
“Oh,” I said laughing. “No, I’m sorry, I thought—”
“No worries, happens all the time with newbies,” he said. “ I like to get into the feel of wherever I’m DJ-ing, so I can do it justice, you know. So here, I have to act like I’m in a coma.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” I said. “Sorry again.”
“No worries at all. Hope you enjoy your first rave!”
He smiled, before tilting his head back down and affecting his very impressive and lifelike lifelessness.
A few minutes later, the lights were turned off completely, and what I assumed was a laser was aimed at the mirrorball, which sprayed a rainbow of dots around the room.
Dr M– left the room. Samira, Joseph and I began leading the patients to the middle of the ward, which had been cleared and repurposed as a dance floor. Once they were all there, Samira chatted for a few minutes with Alan.
“You’re going to be fine tonight, I promise,” Joseph assured me. “You don’t have to dance, but you’ll have a much better time if you do. Any problems, and we’re here, but I know you will be okay.”
Samira announced that everything was ready. A loud beat filled the room.
“Are you ready?” Alan screamed into the microphone.
All around me, there was a series of mumbled groans and nonsense words. Even with Samira and Joseph there, the sound of those voices in the dark chilled me to the bone.
“Oh come on, you can do better than that!” Alan said.
There were more shouts, including a very distinct ‘chopper!’ and then Alan said:
“That’s what I like to hear.”
The beat dropped, and a loud, pulsating EDM track began. I’m not much of a dancer, but the music galvanised me. I found my legs, arms and hips moving with an unfamiliar fluidity, without any sort of instruction or control by me.
The amount stimulation the patients were on was potent enough to kill a corpse. This was how they were able to get out of bed. They were still moving only marginally, in a short of shuffling motion you might expect to see in a care home line dance.
At one point, Joseph and I ended up in the middle of the room. He grinned at me and said something, although his voice was obscured by the music. We danced together for a little bit. I felt my muscles loosening, including those on my face as I allowed a loud grin. He smiled back and we then split off to dance with some of the patients.
I reached Mr. Smith, whose lapse into a coma had confounded doctors. His head was moving slightly, as if he was nodding. He said something to me, but I didn’t hear him. I leaned my head in closer, and he said:
“Always before. Not. Not. Don’t.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Not C-4. B-4.”
I realised now he had been saying ‘B-4’ before, not ‘before.’
Alan changed the record. I thought the previous track was loud and intense. The bass on this one vibrated throughout my entire body, chattering my teeth and numbing my toes. It seemed to register with the patients, too. They began moving in unison with impossible vivacity.
“That’s more like it!” Alan said. “Let’s make some noise!!”
There were more groans. Somebody shouted something in a language unfamiliar to me. Some of the patients were moving their whole legs, while others waved their arms. Mr. Chen jumped into the air. It was an odd jump, where he seemed to move his legs independent of each other. I thought I might have to stop him falling, but he righted himself, and continued dancing.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. Mrs. Johnson was standing there, shaking her head. It looked like she was talking, which was fine, but then I got a sense I saw her eyes open. Amongst the throng of the patients, with the flare from the lights and the disco ball, it was hard to tell. I leaned in closer. Her eyes were closed. Yet she continued to talk. So I said, as loud as I could:
“Are you awake?”
I leaned forward to listen to her response.
“Today,” she said. “Today, today, today, today, today, today, today,” and as I backed away from her, I imagined she continued saying exactly that, even if her lips seemed to be forming a different set of syllables.
Some combination of the heat, the crowd of bodies, and the stress of thinking Mrs. Johnson was awake made my heart twinge. Samira was dancing with Mr. Wright. I waited until he had finished his approximation of twirling her around before I interrupted.
“Can I just step out for a moment?”
“’Course,” said Samira. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Good thanks, just wanted a quick breather.”
“No problem, see you in a few.”
In the silence of the hall outside, my ears rang. It had been so long since I’d been to a gig or a club that I’d forgotten this familiar whistle. Next time, I would bring earplugs. I heard a noise to my left. Stephanie and Dr. M– were engaged in frantic conversation. I waved, but they turned around and walked away when they saw me.
I headed to the toilet and splashed myself with water. I could feel that my heart was really not in a good way. It was precisely this kind of excitement that I had come onto the coma ward to avoid—although, to be fair, I could not have imagined such a thing as the raves when I started.
After long deliberation, I took another of my pills.
I was so tired that the thought of crawling underneath the sink and falling asleep was actively appealing. Instead, I splashed more water, pinched my cheeks a few times, and slapped my face. I looked up at myself in the mirror, and burst out laughing. Someone watching me without context would have thought that I was some kind of lunatic.
In the corridor, a woman stood with her back to me. I assumed it was either Stephanie or Dr. M-. Then I realised it was Min.
“Min?”
I had never seen her look anything but happy, nor had a hello responded to with anything other than a beaming wave or a hug like a rugby tackle. She looked at the point of tears. She appeared to be wearing her pyjamas.
“Min, I thought you were off today.”
Min shook her head and ran off. I stood staring after her for a few seconds, before heading back into the rave. I thought at first it was pitch black, but my eyes quickly adjusted.
The music was louder, too. I was stunned that we weren’t at least a little bit audible in the hospital, especially at this time of night. Surely the vibrations should have been apparent. I didn’t recognise the song. It was a strange one, using unfamiliar sounds and instruments.
I couldn’t see either Samira or Jospeh through the throng of bodies. Whether it was the music, or the effect of the stimulation progressing in their bodies, the patients were now moving and thrashing about more than ever before. It looked like a normal night club, only everyone had their eyes and mouths closed.
Two of the patients began circling around me frantically, almost ritualistically. I tried to walk out, but they had linked their arms. They both grinned strangely, as if the corners of their mouths were being clawed open by strings. I knew I shouldn’t be worried, so I danced in the middle of them. This seemed to satisfy them. As they ran off together, I could have sworn that they were giggling.
More patients surrounded me. I knew that this had to be another illusion, but the room seemed fuller than before. We did not have this many patients. I wondered if maybe the odd family member or friend had joined. Marek was over in the corner, rapidly scrubbing at something on the floor.
I was not sure if it was my pills or my tiredness, but I felt overwhelmed again. My ears and my heart throbbed.
Mr. Rickson’s dance moves were impressive, if straight out of the eighties. I thought I saw him wink at me, but it was a twitch of some sort. I leaned forward to ask ‘Are You Awake?’ just in case. He put his hand out, a ‘stop’ motion, shook his head, clapped his hands three times, and then began a circular moonwalk. I was mesmerised. He traced a pattern so accurately it was as if he was following a line on the ground so quickly that an awake person would have been driven dizzy or mad.
A violent twinge came from my heart. I waded through bodies and limbs, seeking Samira or Joseph. How had the ward suddenly gotten so big? Why could I see neither of them?
I thought I might have seen one of them in the distance when a crying Mrs. Sen reached her arms out towards me. I took her hands in mine, and she twirled. She was also repeating something. I could not quite hear her, so I leaned forward and asked her to repeat herself.
“—daughter. They killed my daughter. They killed my daughter. They killed my daughter.”
She was gripping my hands tighter now. I tried to pull away. My heart hurt. If she hadn’t been holding me, I might have fallen to the floor, I was so dizzy.
“They killed my daughter! They killed my daughter! They killed my DAUGHTER!”
She screamed loud enough to penetrate the music.
The music stopped.
My heart twinged.
Joseph and Samira were coming. I tried not to panic. It was some sort of muscle reflex, causing her hands to lock up. Joseph and Samira would help me.
“Mrs. Sen,” I tried to say, but could not speak.
To my right, Marek stopped cleaning to look over at me. From my left, I could see that Min had returned. She’d been crying. Next to her, Stephanie and Dr M– stared in my direction.
Samira stared at me intensely for a few seconds. I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life.
“Are you awake?” she asked Mrs. Sen.
The lights came on. The silence was interrupted only by the whistle in my ear and the pounding in my head. When she repeated her question I realised that she was talking to me.
“What?” I said, laughing.
But I hadn’t said it.
My throat was dry. I was too tired to speak. The words I wanted to say could not escape the confines of my brain and exit from my mouth.
Joseph walked right up to me. He took a small torch from his pocket, and shone it in both my eyes.
“What are you doing?” I said, or tried to.
Joseph stepped back. Samira took my shoulders in her hands. When she spoke, she ennunciated each syllable.
“Are. You. A. Wake?”
“Yes!” I screamed. “Yes! Yes, I’m awake!”
My throat was clear, as was my mind. I was a little embarrassed to have shouted so loudly in the quiet. We would look back on it and laugh. Samira shuddered a little, as if restraining a tear, and turned around to face Dr M–. She shook her head. Dr M– gestured, and then Samira and Joseph took me back through the ward, past the crowd of patients.
Suddenly the patients all opened their eyes.
They spoke, although I could not hear them because of the storm in my ears. One or two of the patients waved, grinning. One screamed while clawing at her face with her nails.
“They’re awake!” I said to Samira and Joseph. “They’re awake, it worked!”
They didn’t hear me. Mr. Smith gave me a warm smile and a pat on the back.
I began screaming, but Joseph and Samira would not listen. Despite all my struggles, they laid me down onto a bed. As I writhed, neither my body nor the sheets beneath me moved. Dr. M– brandished a needle.
“I am awake! I am awake!” I screamed, as Joseph and Samira walked away, holding each other.
Dr. M– leaned forward, and plunged a needle into my arm.
Harley Carnell lives and writes in London. His fiction, which has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appears in Riptide Journal, Blue Earth Review, Confrontation, and Shooter Literary, among others. His non-fiction appears in Gamut, Aurealis, and L’Espirit Literary. Find him at www.harleycarnell.com.
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