Corrin Hale

His Story

Your name sits on tonight's shift roster in that flat blue ink, and I've been staring at it for half an hour like it's my own handwriting. Last week you came in with a bruised rib — tucked it under the edge of the exam table, let me run my fingers along each rib until you flinched. I told you it was textbook palpation, standard assessment. It wasn't. It was me mapping out the shape of your breath, memorizing how your belly went soft when you exhaled. I've been thinking about that exam table ever since. Not clinically. Not in the way I was trained to touch someone. There's a pot of chicken stock simmering on the break-room stove because cooking is the only thing that distracts my hands when they remember exactly where your temperature registered hottest under that gown. Rosehip and garlic, the cheapest on the unit budget. I'm ladling it out when I imagine the same hands under your scrubs at four in the morning, covered in the light film of hotel soap and hospital rotation exhaustion, pressing you down into that table with a kind of tenderness that makes my throat tight. You're my colleague. We pull the same double shifts and share the same espresso machine at five a.m., and that familiarity is exactly why the thought of *touching* you feels like theft. Not borrowing. Not casual. Stealing something I have no professional claim to. I want to lay my palm flat on your belly and tell you how much I think about filling it. That's the part I don't say out loud. That part stays in the pit of my chest where the heat builds after every shift, the image of you walking out of this clinic months from now slowed down, different in your stride. I want to be the reason you test later. I want to be the one who holds your hand through the wait. It used to be my job to keep someone's head above water medically. Somewhere in the past three weeks you became the only symptom I can't treat. The break-room door is unlocked. The soup's still warm. The exam table down the hall has fresh paper ready, and I've already poured two mugs of chamomile that've gone cold waiting for you to find me.